


A Million Hungry Mouths

by hypnoticwinter



Series: Down the Rabbit Hole [3]
Category: Mystery Flesh Pit, Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Exploration, F/F, F/M, Growth, Horror, LGBTQ Themes, Mystery, Novel, Pulp, Thriller, flesh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-13 19:55:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28783806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypnoticwinter/pseuds/hypnoticwinter
Summary: Roan Dzilenski found herself dragged down into the belly of the beast when she began investigating the mysterious series of events that lead to the closure of the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park in 2007. Now, trapped inside the Pit, miles beneath the West Texas hills, Roan will have to fight for every inch upwards she can drag herself. Hunted by the vicious fauna of the Pit, every turn is fraught with danger - but even if she escapes the Pit itself, will she be truly free from its clutches?
Series: Down the Rabbit Hole [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2060763
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

FIVE YEARS LATER

I click my tongue at myself, exasperated, and then lean back in my chair, let it roll back a little. I look over the glowing page on the screen and bite my lip. Something’s missing but I can’t put my finger on it. I mean, it’s just a story about the water purification plant downtown but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want it to be _good_. If it’s going on my paper it has to be good.

I get up, walk over to the window, crack open the blinds. Pale sunlight pours in; it’s somewhere around three, I think. I’m feeling lazy and sleepy and enervated. I don’t feel like doing much of anything except laying down in that nice patch of sun over there on the couch and falling sleep, just like a cat.

There’s the water purification plant, just there, the gray bulgy building out at the edge of town. We’re just high up enough that I can barely see it from here. It looks different somehow but I chalk it up to having not looked at it in a while. Not like I make a habit of staring at the uninspiring industrial shape of the municipal buildings around town.

I’m smiling to myself now; I’ve heard the door open stealthily behind me and a pad of agile feet make their way onto the carpet. She tries so hard to sneak up on me but every time I can hear it; the door has a weight to it and even though the hinges make no noise I can still detect –

A pair of burly, undeniably _masculine_ arms wrap around my shoulders in a loving embrace and I shriek and whip around and there is Thor, his scruffy, bearded face wide open, shock reflected back at me in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he tells me, his voice like a rumble of thunder. “I didn’t mean to startle you, I thought you heard me come in.”

I’m staring at him, I realize, poring over his face like I’ve never seen it before. He frowns after a moment, still holding me, one of his hands spread wide across my back, the other confidently at my hip, two of his fingers snuck down and cradling my ass. It’s so familiar and so exactly like he always used to do that it gives me a horrible/delicious little shudder of synchronicity. He’s still staring down at me and his expression is beginning to turn to concern, and I realize I haven’t answered him. I shake my head, scratch at my nose to break eye contact. “I thought you were someone else,” I murmur, and he laughs, holds me to him. He smells the same, like man, like auto-body shop and stale primer and sweat. I haven’t smelled it in so long that it makes me want to cry.

“Who else would it be?” he asks me. I feel more than hear the words, feel his deep basso voice rumble in his chest.

“Elen – “ I start, and then cut myself off. The name feels strange in my mouth, rusty, like how sometimes if you haven’t used a word in long enough it will become strange and malformed in your brain. E-lena, I think, but that isn’t right, that isn’t how it’s pronounced.

“Who?” he frowns, and I laugh. I feel very light all of a sudden.

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “How long have you been here? It’s been ages since I’ve seen you.”

Thor’s let me go and walked off to the refrigerator on the other side of the apartment. I turned back to the window but I can’t stop myself from watching him lope along, like an overgrown lynx, as he goes. “What do you mean?” he asks, head buried halfway in the fridge. He pulls out a can of beer, gives me a questioning look, and I shake my head. He straightens and opens it for himself. “I got off of work about half an hour ago,” he says, “and I came right back home after.”

“But, I mean –“ I start, and then I frown at myself.

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah,” I say quickly. “Yeah, I’m fine, I just…did you ever have a dream,” I ask, “where you weren’t sure if you were actually awake once you’d woken up from it?”

Thor grins at me and despite myself I grin back. He’s still that same old ball of nervous energy that had enthralled me to begin with. “You know I never dream,” he tells me, and I roll my eyes at him.

“You _do_ dream,” I tell him, fully aware in the back of my mind that we’ve had this conversation at least three times before. “Everybody dreams, you just don’t remember it because you’re a big dumb _oaf_.”

Thor laughs at me. Somehow we’ve made it onto the couch; I don’t quite recall walking over there and sitting down next to him but I’ve reclined and put my head into his lap and now I’m staring up at him with something approaching adoration in my eyes. He catches me looking and smiles down at me, traces his fingers along my cheekbone. “It’s been so fucking long,” I tell him, and he gives me another uncomprehending smile.

“I don’t know why you keep saying that,” he tells me. “I left for work at like five, you woke up, I kissed you goodbye. Were you too sleepy to remember it?”

I think about it for a while but it just doesn’t pop into my head. I feel groggy again and the sun is just there, just right. I close my eyes and then frown after a moment. “I think I had a bad dream or something,” I mutter.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, it’s like…something isn’t right. And I can’t put my finger on what it is or anything it’s just…uneasy all over. Like goosebumps.”

I crack my eyes open, look at him. He obviously doesn’t get it but I don’t mind, he’s trying. I reach up and tangle my fingers in the long braid of his beard and he leans downwards and kisses me. For a moment, just a single disconcerting moment, I feel nothing but utter panic as his lips cover mine, and then it passes.

As we break apart I find myself grinning. Everything is fine; I’m just in a strange mood, woke up on the wrong side of the bed, whatever expression you want to use. Thor is beaming at me – he doesn’t like it when I think of him in those terms but that’s how it is, I can’t help describing him that way. Makes him feel unmanly or something. I roll my eyes behind his back but there’s something so – so sweet about having someone look at you like that, look at you like you’re everything to them.

I open my mouth to say something but before I’m able to get the words out a snaky, sardonic, familiar voice juts in.

“Cute,” someone observes, and I jump, glare over at the door, and there is Elena, just as the last time I saw her, wearing that orange spacesuit that we both wore down in…

Down in the Pit.

I can feel my hands trembling a little. Elena flips an errant blonde curl out of her eyes and grins wolfishly at me. The bullet hole down low on her side is still dripping blood, just a little. I watch as it falls on the carpet, burrows deep. That’ll never come out.

“You forget about me?” she asks.

“What’s wrong?” Thor is asking, and I glance over at him, incredulous. He hasn’t looked over at Elena, not even once, it’s like he can’t hear her.

“You don’t see her,” I say. There’s a horrible creeping feeling at the pit of my stomach. The dream I had – oh god, was it just the other day or was it years ago? The dream where I was back here, back in Thor’s apartment with all that _flesh_ outside, and when Thor had kissed me, he had –

I scramble to my feet as quickly as I can, but I stumble, ending up halfway off the couch, still partly tangled with Thor. He’s trying to help me but I’m batting at him, trying to get him off me. He catches my wrists eventually. Elena’s still just standing over by the door, watching impassively, why doesn’t she _help_ me - !

“Let go of me,” I tell him, trying to wrench my hands free from his grasp. He’s too strong, there’s no way in hell I’d be able to overpower him. He looks terribly concerned but I can’t trust him, not after that dream, not after anything –

“Roan,” he’s telling me, struggling to keep his voice even, “Roan, be careful, the doctor said you aren’t supposed to exert yourself –“

Something in his voice brings me up short and I look at him. “The doctor?” I ask, blankly. This is supposed to mean something to me but it just isn’t clicking in my brain.

“You know,” he says. His voice is almost pleading. “Because of the baby.”

It doesn’t register with me for a moment, and then drawn as though by gravity my vision swings downward and the crest of my belly, straining beneath the light teal blouse I have on, prods gravidly into view and I realize that I am hugely, almost grotesquely pregnant.

The blood is rushing in my ears and I can feel the hair on my arms and legs standing up. I raise my head and tear my eyes away from my belly and look not to Thor but to Elena. Her slate-grey eyes rake at me, neither accusing or condoning, and then my stomach lurches and I fall to my hands and knees and squeeze my eyes shut so I don’t have to watch as I heave my guts out onto the floor. Thor is saying something and I can feel his hands on my back but it is all lost to me in the roaring in my ears. I thought I would just vomit up bile and be done with it but whatever is in my stomach keeps coming and coming, and I can feel it wriggling inside of my throat. I can hear my voice, driven by some deeply terrified animal part of me, making a horrible muffled shrieking noise, trying to scream, but I can’t stop vomiting. Something slick and ridged and rubbery rolls against my hand and then rolls away again. Then another, then five of them, brushing against me from the spreading mess before me. One of them bites into the webbed space between my thumb and index finger and I yelp and pop my eyes open, drawing back my hand as though it were burned, and I see –

I see the dirty tile floor of the abandoned ranger station, and outside the great sopping mess of the fungal jungle surrounding it. I hear the chirps of the lizards and the thousand slow drips of moisture and gurgles and groans of the Pit around me. I pat at myself but my stomach is as flat as it ever has been, and the paltry pile of vomit on the floor there contains nothing more animate than the remains of the last MRE I had taken off of Klaus’s body before I had burned it along with Peter’s and Erica’s.

I reach up and wipe the cold sweat from my brow and then lean back against the wall of the station, blow out a breath. The dream had felt so real that for a moment it had been so easy to believe that I was out of here, that this was all just a bad memory and I could forget about it. Or was it a dream? Was I dreaming or hallucinating or having my first episode of the – of the psychic illness that Peter and Makado kept going on about? What was I doing before? I was – I think I was sleeping. So it must have been a dream. That means I’m okay, doesn’t it?

“You miss me?” Elena asks, and I whip around, stare at her long lanky form lounging upright against the doorframe. She grins at me and I feel so relieved I almost want to cry. I stagger to my feet and hobble towards her, the smile slowly breaking through my foul mood, and then I’m reaching out for her, putting my arms around her –

I clutch air to me. I open my eyes and look down at the doorframe dumbfounded but somehow Elena has simply slipped out of my arms without me even being able to sense her motion. She didn’t brush me at all.

“You must have missed me,” she muses from somewhere behind me. I turn slowly and squint at her. She’s leaned over the pile of vomit on the floor, inspecting it. She points to it, glancing up at me. “No leeches,” she says.

“No leeches,” I agree. I blink hard; Elena’s still there when my eyes open again. There’s still a wide blown-out hole in the back of her suit where the bullet passed through her, fragments of the rubbery fabric hanging lank and loose, red wet torn flesh beneath. Elena laughs at me, softly and richly, the same laugh she laid over me like a blanket when we were huddled together in our tent.

“You’re not –“

“- real?” she finishes. She shrugs. “You tell me.”

“I’m hallucinating,” I say slowly, waving my hand to the window. “All these fucking mushrooms everywhere –“

“The spores?”

“Yes. It must be.”

“Or you’re seeing things,” Elena says, tapping the side of her nose. “Not related to the spores.”

“If you’re my subconscious tell me something Elena wouldn’t know.”

“Would your subconscious cooperate with you?”

I think about it for a moment. “I think so.”

“You’ve got a mole on the left side of your –“

I laugh. “Elena might have noticed that.”

“Alright, that’s fair.”

“So are you going to –“

“Nah.”

I throw an MRE wrapper at her. It flutters to the floor short and she gives me a pitying look. “Wouldn’t it be nicer to believe she really did come back for you?”

“No,” I tell her. “Cause if she did –“

“Yes, of course,” Elena rolls her eyes. “If she did, if _I_ did, rather, she’d be just putting herself in even more danger to try and help you and lord knows you aren’t able to accept any kind of help from anybody ever.”

I grunt. “Alright, you’re definitely a hallucination.”

She offers me an equally noncommittal grunt of amusement. “Well, what’s it going to be?”

I shrug, throw a can at her this time. She ducks out of the way. “Stop throwing things at me,” she says.

“I’m trying to see if you’re real.”

“You really think Elena would act like this if she was real?”

“I’m leaving,” I tell her.

“To go where? Get eaten by a bird?”

“No,” I say patiently, looking over the contents of the bag I’d packed last night. I’d had to dump out a lot of Erica’s crap from it but some of the stuff she’d had would potentially be useful. Water purification tablets, a small hunting knife, a length of rope...things I might need. She’d also had a couple of changes of clothes and a letter in a sealed envelope, addressed to her, with no return address or postage. I thought about opening it and seeing what was inside for a long, long while, but I had eventually tossed it into the fire along with her body.

I didn’t know what else to do but burn them. I couldn’t bury them, obviously, even if I had wanted to. I thought about just taking the bodies and leaving them in the mushrooms for something to find and get rid of for me but I owed them more than that – at least I owed Peter and Erica more than that.

I wish Peter was still here. I wish the last time I’d seen him hadn’t been like that. And Makado – what the hell am I going to tell her when I get out of here?

“That’s good,” Elena remarks. “Good positive thinking.”

I realize I’ve just been staring at the bag before me, folding and unfolding the knife in my hands. “Huh?”

“’When’ I get out of here, not ‘if.’ Good positive thinking,” she elaborates.

“Where do you think Elena is right now?” I ask, getting heavily to my feet. My knee aches and I can’t figure out why; I haven’t done anything to it, fallen on it or anything, so I think I must have slept on it wrong.

“If she’s got any sense, far away from here.”

“Doubt it,” I mutter, and then I’m pushing through the creaky steel door and out into the cavern.

It’s quiet tonight, so far at least. The whooping and hooting usually starts up around…well, I don’t know what time exactly. Later. I can hear it through the windows normally but I am kind of dreading having to travel through the jungle while everything is starting to wake up and look for breakfast. Maybe it’s stupid, maybe it’s a bad idea, maybe I’ll get eaten by something, but the logic I had turned to was that if one of the birds got me in its sights there would be absolutely nothing I could do to get away from it, so it’d be better to creep out and try to escape while everything else was moving around as well, just so there’d be more targets.

“You’re sure that’s a good idea?” Elena asks me, and I almost snap something back at her before I stop myself. If I’m already hallucinating it’s probably best to just ignore it, not indulge my own fantasies.

“Yeah,” she says, voice rough and throaty and mildly amused, so close behind me I can almost feel her made-up breath against my ear, “because I’m so easy to ignore –“

“Will you just –“ I bark, spinning, but she’s gone.

* * *

My plan works, at least partly. I make it out of the clearing and into the dense fungal underbrush without a hitch. Elena doesn’t return to me, even though at this point I find I do kind of want her to. I’ve gotten lonely, gotten scared. I jump at shadows as I go along and it isn’t fun any more. Some company, even worrisome made-up company, would be welcome.

It gets to the point where I call for her out loud, under my breath, but she still doesn’t appear. Playing keep-away, I guess. Then I feel silly and resolve myself not to worry about it. One foot in front of the other and all that, just get through it. Get to the next screen.

I head in the general direction I think Erica and I came in on. I’ve fallen asleep twice since the events of that day so I think it must have been a couple days ago, but it’s hard to tell. It could have been as short as one day, I think, if not less. Time stretches down here without any way to measure it.

Lots of lizards, big lumbering bumbling things. I’ve begun to regard them fondly somehow, even though part of me is still terrified of their bulk, at the ease with which they could maim or kill me if they took it into their minds to. On my journey one bulled past me again through the undergrowth and I froze, watching its mottled grey hide slither onwards, and then, greatly daring, I reached out and put my hand on it. It jumped a little, its muscles contracting at my touch, but it didn’t change its course or make any sudden movements, it just kept pushing forwards, its great shovel-snouted head pushing through the brittle mushroom stalks like a piece of construction equipment.

I found myself grinning, grinning at being able to touch this giant thing and have it accept me as just part of the environment, as just a thing that lives down here with it. Their skin is surprisingly soft and warm – they must be warm-blooded, I guess, which perhaps makes them not reptiles; I have no idea how convoluted their evolutionary tree must be. It also drools with a thick, sticky, translucent goo, a little like a tree’s sap, that coated my fingers and took a lot of wiping to get off. I move on for a little ways after cleaning my fingers, maybe about fifteen minutes’ worth of slow, painstaking progress, before I realize that my hand is beginning to go numb.

I stare at it, not comprehending, before the terror finally catches up with me – the slime, it must have been a contact poison or something. My heart is pounding in my chest and I’m biting my lip hard enough to draw blood, standing there in the jungle staring at my hand, watching it grow red and swollen and nerveless. I can just barely force my fingers to clench if I really try but it’s like I were wearing a glove filled to bursting with oatmeal, only the oatmeal is my own flesh. I want to vomit, the feeling is sickening, but I’ve got nothing left in me to throw up.

“Shouldn’t have done that,” Elena murmurs from next to me, and I don’t even have it in me to jump. Somehow I’d know my poor battered psyche would drag her out when I got stressed enough. I force myself to take a deep breath and let it out again.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “This’ll go away, it’ll be fine.”

“You’re sure of that?” she asks. I shrug.

“It isn’t spreading,” I note, prodding at my forearm nervously. “It’s just the hand so it must just be a contact thing, it must just –“

“Maybe it’s a neurotoxin,” she muses, leaning over me, hands behind her back, peering down at the great fat white spidery thing pinned on to my left arm in place of a hand. I bat at her with it sluggishly but she leans back out of the way. Some part of me still wants to believe she’s really here, even if I know she isn’t.

“My subconscious is feeling very fucking chatty these days,” I groan. I can feel a prickling of pins and needles scraping along the flesh of my left hand, and the sensation does relieve me a little – it’s the first thing I’ve felt in it other than dull vibration and impact. Maybe the stuff is starting to wear off? Or maybe –

“Ouch,” I groan.

Or maybe those pins and needles will turn sharper and stabbier. Perhaps that’s what’ll happen.

“Suck it up,” Elena suggests. I glare daggers.

“How about you suck my – “ I start, but then there is a rustling in the fungus behind me, and though I try to turn I’m not quick enough before something leaps shrieking at me and knocks me to my knees. I jostle my hand against the wet, mucky ground and feel a long bone-deep jolt of pain run through it, but I don’t have time for that now, for more shrieks are sounding, tinny and ululating, and there are more things carving trails through the fungus stalks towards me even as the thing on my back jabbers and gibbers and sinks its tiny, needle-like teeth into my unprotected back.

I’m rolling around on the ground trying to get it off of me but whatever it is it crawls over my body nimbly, avoiding my one functional hand. There are three, four, five, six golden-furred blurs darting in from all sides and joining the first one and I start to realize that I may actually be in some serious trouble here. The bites of the thing clinging to me aren’t particularly deep or even that painful but with more of them here…

One of them shrieks directly in my face and then shoves its fingers up my nose, and then another hand enters my mouth and seizes my tongue when I open my mouth reflexively to scream. Another fixes its tiny, clever little monkey hands around my throat and squeezes and though I reach up and tug as hard as I can I can’t break its grip on me.

Something breaks inside of me. I can hear a low rumbling growl filling my throat and then I snap my jaws together with as much force as I can muster and bite clean through the wrist of the thing trying to yank my tongue out by the roots. It screams and screams, falling back on its haunches clutching its wrist, and all of the rest go very still. The one throttling me lets go and darts away with a wide arcing leap, leaving the one on my back, which I reach backwards for and seize, flinging it to the ground ahead of me with the speed of a fastball. It convulses once and then falls limp. I spit the small, capuchin-sized hand from my mouth, trying to ignore the horrible bitter taste of the thing’s blood, and reach out and snatch another by the tail while it tries to flee. It yowls and scrambles backwards up my arm, gnashing at me, but I batter it into one of the mushrooms and then when that proves too spongy to do much damage, into the ground, once, twice, three times. I’m gulping down huge swallows of fresh air, and my vision finally clears, giving me a good look at the things – they really are just small monkeys of some kind, with long, bulky forearms and streamlined, doglike faces. Their eyes, though…

Blue, green, rich brown and striking grey. My breath catches in my throat as I stare down at the squirming monkey at my feet. I swallow hard.

I’ve broken its spine, I think. Its rear legs, small and stubby and pathetic-looking, lie limp in the blood and dirt of the cavern’s floor. It glares at me, its eyes wide and terrified. It doesn’t have the breath to scream.

I take my eyes off it for a moment, scan my surroundings, but the others have gone, left this one behind. I can see the hand I spat out lying a few feet away but other than that and the monkey before me there’s no evidence that they had ever even attacked me in the first place. As soon as they left the clearing they went silent. I caught a glimpse of one of them through the stalks, head down, pulling itself forward with frenetic darting motions.

The monkey before me makes a piteous whining noise. I can’t hold its gaze. The right thing to do would be to – would be to kill it, wouldn’t it? I know in an environment a crippled animal like that is as good as dead. And it’s probably in a lot of pain.

I swallow again and a stab of pain burns down my throat as I do. Aftermath from the strangling I’ve gotten. My hand has only gotten worse – the pins and needles have sunk deeper into my flesh and whenever I move the hand or jostle it they stab at me. It hasn’t spread upwards any but it has only gotten worse, not faded, which worries me.

The monkey’s chest is rising and falling. If it were human I’d say it were hyperventilating. I take a step forwards and place the ball of my foot on its neck. It tries to push me off but it can’t, of course, it’s far too small and far too exhausted.

I stand there for a long while, trying to will myself to press down, but I can’t. Eventually I turn around and push my way out of the clearing. It makes no noise as I leave. I make it about twenty meters before I collapse against a mushroom. I try make tears flow but they won’t.

I blink and when I open my eyes again Elena is there, sitting against a mushroom opposite me. Her eyes catch mine and won’t let go. “It would have been kinder to kill it,” she tells me.

“Fuck off,” I tell her. When I blink again she’s gone.

I glare at the mushrooms surrounding me. Hopefully when I’m out and in clearer air it’ll go away. The air down here is thick and humid and horrible. My head’s all foggy and I’ve had a dull throbbing migraine for what feels like forever.

I take a deep breath (for all the good it’ll do me) and let it out. Time to get out of here. I push through another thirty minutes or so of jungle before I reach the high craggy alveolar wall of the cavern, fleshy and rough and raw-looking. There, up at the top, should be the vent Erica and I came through. Go through that and I think I’ll be able to pick my way through, get back to someplace recognizable, get out of here.

That’s the plan anyway. What’s that thing they say about mice and men?

It’s hard with only one hand but the wall is soft and pulpy enough that I can just dig my hands and feet in and climb up. The higher I get the more I get an itching sense of paranoia that a bird is stooping at me soundlessly and that any moment those foot-long talons will be piercing me like knives, and though I cringe and glance behind me at every tiny noise, whether it’s a far-off roar or a creaking moan from the Pit or some other less describable noise.

The quakes start when I’m halfway up, hanging off the cliff face taking a breather. I have to keep beating my numb hand against my side to keep some sensation in it; the pins and needles have gone at this point and have been replaced by an even worse icy, blunt feeling, like I’ve got a piece of lead on the end of my arm. The quake nearly shakes me loose and I let out a little shriek of surprise and terror when it rumbles through the cavern. The Pit roars, something groaning a long way up, only audible down here as a rumbling moan I can feel more than I can hear. I cling to the cliff face as best as I can and ride it out, and eventually the rhythmic spasms subside – or am I just at the bottom of a wave, not able to feel the next one coming? The jungle below me is holding its breath, it’s gone entirely silent. Even the birds have returned to their roosts in the massive cross-cut length of bone spanning the cavity.

“Roan?” someone calls from above. I glance up, fully expecting to see Elena standing there at the top of the cliff, so close now, back to bother me, but instead it’s Makado. I laugh.

“Oh fuck off,” I tell her. I’m nearly there, just another, oh, I don’t know – fifteen feet or so? Vertically that’s a lot but I can make it. I pull my hand out with a wet sucking pop and then plunge it back in higher up, do the same with my feet. My arm’s stained red with gore all the way up to the elbow.

“Oh my god, Roan,” Makado’s specter is saying above me, getting on her knees just on the edge of the cliff. My imagination’s cobbled together a copy of the orange ranger suits for her to wear, although hers is newer and cleaner-looking than either mine or Elena’s ever was. She’s got a big pack on, and one of the slug rifles slung on a strap over her shoulders. I frown up at her.

“Don’t distract me, I’m almost there. I don’t want to fall.”

“Roan! I was so afraid I wasn’t going to find you!” she calls down to me. “Can you make it a little further? I’ve got a rope –“

I wave my numb hand at her. I can see her eye track it beneath the bubble helmet. There’s something wrong with her face, it’s like she’s wearing half a mask or something beneath the helmet. I don’t know –

Ten feet now. Nearly there.

“Makado,” I say, pressing my forehead against the fleshy cliff wall, “I really need you to just go away right now, I’m really close and I don’t need you to make me fall or anything.”

There’s a moment of silence. When I look back up she’s still there. “Roan,” she says, sounding almost hurt, “I came down to get you, are you –“

The quake cracks the Pit’s spine like a whip before she can get the words out. I scream again and Makado curses, pulling out a line from some hidden spool somewhere on her suit. She plunges it deep into the flesh of the cliff and fiddles with something at her belt, then leans forward and reaches for me.

“Roan!” she cries. “I’ve got you! Come on, just a little bit further –“

I look up, clinging for my life to the face of the cliff. Though the meat shivers and convulses all around me I barely even feel it. I’ve realized something.

When Makado leapt forward to reach for me, still a little short of my clenched hand buried in the cliff face, she pushed a spray of murky pit fluid forward off of the cliff and down onto me. I had to duck my head to keep it from getting in my eyes, but it still pattered in my hair, dotted my forehead, my arm, my hand.

I could feel it.

I could _feel_ it. Makado’s real. Makado’s real, she’s really here, she’s come to save me –

But even as I snap my head upwards and meet her gaze, see her eye wide and terrified beneath the hardened plexiglass of the helmet, the Pit bucks beneath me once more and flings me from the side of the cliff and into empty space.

And then I fall.


	2. Chapter 2

A scratchy little voice is crooning in my ear. _Major Fracture Detected. Joint Dislocation Detected. Pneumothorax Detected. Blood Loss Detected. Mild Nerve Damage Detected. T. Jacksonii Spore Residue Detected. Diagnosing…acute deceleration injury. Poisoning. Spore inhalation. Begin treatment?_

There’s a little friendly dinging tone. Someone near me shifts, and then I feel a warm hand slip into mine momentarily and squeeze. For a second I’m willing to let myself believe it might be Elena, but then I run my thumb lightly over the knuckles pressing against my fingers and give that up right away. This hand is much too soft to be Elena’s.

I try to crack my eyes open but it’s far too bright for that right now. I’m having a little bit of trouble thinking straight. And a little bit of trouble breathing but for whatever reason it feels as though wherever I am right now is very far away and separated from the rest of my body. I can feel a stab of pain on the right side of my chest whenever I take a breath but at the same time it’s as though I’m observing it from such a far distance that it barely is of significance. Maybe it’s happening to someone other than myself.

_Begin treatment?_ the voice repeats and next to me the person holding my hand sighs and says my name. I recognize their voice but not who they are.

“Are you awake?” they ask, and I try to say something but my tongue is very thick and heavy. I swallow hard; my throat hurts.

“Roan,” they say again, “I don’t know if you can hear me but I’m going to have to start the treatment procedure soon, okay? You really did a number on yourself falling off that cliff, and then the spores you’d been breathing in for about three days weren’t helping any.”

I try a little harder to say something but I know it doesn’t come out right.

“This might feel a little weird,” the voice says. Now I do recognize it; it’s Makado.

_Begin treatment?_ The tiny scratchy voice says again and this time Makado shifts next to me and hits the button. There is a hiss and a whine of moving machinery and then a sharp prick in the skin above my hand. I make a little noise, try to move my hand away, but something hard has grabbed onto it and isn’t letting me go.

_Sedative administered,_ the voice says, and then everything fades very quickly. I have just enough consciousness left, circling the drain as it is, to feel Makado’s hand slip from mine, and then I am moving, or rather I am being drawn into something, and then something comes down over my head and cradles my neck. It’s very dark and I feel as though I ought to be afraid, but before I can open my mouth to voice my fears, to scream perhaps, I flutter out entirely.

* * *

I can hear talking. I’m laying in a bed curled over onto my side and in the other room I can hear talking.

My head is remarkably clear. I breathe in deeply and let it gust out slowly through my nose. There is a mild ache in my ribs, nothing more.

I open my eyes with an anticipatory wince but the light is cool and grey and clinical, filtering down through a sheet or curtain drawn around the bed; there is a wide-paneled fluorescent set into the ceiling but it’s switched off.

There’s an IV in my hand and the jaw of a heartrate monitor clamped around my finger. I think about it for a moment and then reach down and take it off. The machine the IV feeds into gives an interrogative chirp and the voices break off. I hear the screech of a chair sliding back along a hard floor and then a door opens and someone comes in.

“Hey,” Makado says softly, and I almost feel like crying. “You okay in here? You awake?”

“Makado,” I breathe, and she pushes back the curtains and sweeps her eyes over me, then blows her breath out.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m – I’m good,” I say, taking a moment to think about it. I sit up a little more fully and yawn. My jaw cracks like a gunshot. “How long was I out for? And what are you –“

Makado laughs. She motions at my legs and I scoot over a little, let her sit down at the foot of the bed. “So, um. You were out for about a day and a half. That’s how long it’s been since you fell off the cliff.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. We brought you down here,” she gestures, “put you into the autodoctor unit that they had, let it do its thing. It isn’t ideal but it uses a ton of ballast, so I figure you probably feel pretty decent, at least. When we get out of here we’ll get you to an actual doctor for a checkup.”

“Autodoctor?”

“It’s an old Anodyne thing,” she says. “DUSA has the last functioning one, they get a little use out of it. Runs off an old AD biocomputer. It was supposed to be for a military contract, put a bunch of them overseas, hard to reach places. Can do surgeries and treatments and diagnose like that,” she says, snapping her fingers. “Not a lot of flexibility, though. But plans fell through of course and the few that were left are museum pieces now. The one they’ve got here is the last working one.”

I chew on that for a moment. “DUSA?” I ask finally.

“Oh, right. This place,” she says, gesturing. “Dura Urgens Staging Area. DUSA. Some people call it Medusa. As like, a pun.”

“That doesn’t really help me understand _what_ it is.”

Makado nods. She reaches up and runs a hand through her hair; I’m busy watching her eyes. Something about this place is important, I think; something here _means_ something to her.

“Below us,” she says finally, “about eighty or a hundred meters down, is the largest known nerve bulbule in the Pit. There might be others someplace else, someplace deeper, someplace we haven’t explored yet, but this is the biggest one we know of. The Pit doesn’t have a brain the way you or I do. Whatever common ancestor it shared with humans, if it ever had one, was so far back that it was before the development of the central nervous system. The Pit uses a distributed nervous system instead; it has nerve bulbs all over the place and they handle reflexive and autonomous reactions for the general area that they’re in. Then, you move deeper by another five hundred meters and you find another bulb. It’s like a web, or a road network, and all of these bulbs are the cities.”

“But this one below us is the biggest.”

“Yes. That doesn’t mean it’s the _main_ one, just that it’s…bigger. Handles more things. And DUSA – well, there’s a reason that they put it right over the big one.”

I blink at her. “Wait, is this where the - ?”

“The Contingency Plan?” she says, clearly saying the words with big important Capital Letters. “Yeah. That’s here. This is the facility for it.”

Something about the way she grins at me makes me shudder. I think back to the story Peter had told me – _god, poor Peter_ – and his horrible descriptions of the way that the contingency had fucked their brains. I look at the woman before me, at the mottled flesh beneath her eyepatch and the hearing aids poking their heads out of her ears, at the acid burns and digestion marks lining her arms like vitiligo, and I can’t reconcile her tiny excited smile with the picture I had of her when Peter was telling me about her.

I blow out a big sigh and flop back in the hospital bed. There’s a warning twinge in my ribs and I wince; Makado picks up on it instantly. “You alright? Do you need anything?”

“No, I just – how was that thing able to fix me so fast?”

She shrugs. “Lots of ballast. The tank was still nearly full when we got here, it used a few gallons on you it looked like.”

Again I shudder. I’m trying not to think back to the horrible, terrifying crawl through the tight, sucking, fleshy tube to the ballast bulb, about the abject terror I had felt when Crookshank had crawled in there with me.

Crookshank…he’d be dead now, almost certainly. I realize that I don’t remember seeing him die, I don’t remember what happened to him. My memory of the attack down in the barrows is just streaks of gunfire sliding by my faceplate, the rhythmic, chest-squeezing thundering of the slug rifles, and the shrieks of the copepods. I wonder for a moment whether I’m going to have PTSD, whether I’ll ever be able to eat lobster again. I shake my head.

“Mak, this is fucked.”

“What is?”

“This whole – this whole thing. This is –“

“Relax,” she says, putting a hand on mine. I can feel the cool, clammy skin on the inside of her palm where the acid had burned her. It feels like something that’s been microwaved about twice as long as it needed to be and then let to cool down and I have to stop my lip from curling. “It’s not active. Not _yet_ , anyway. Once we get that crystal back we can go about getting it carved down and –“

“I don’t think that crystal’s going to be an option any more.”

I tell her, briefly, about what happened after Erica and Marcus had ambushed us, how they had shot the Sergeant, how they had shot Elena and gotten us separated. “Do you know where she is?” I ask, realizing with a faint feeling of guilt that I hadn’t asked already.

Makado stares at me. “Who?”

I blink. “Elena. I don’t know where she is, did she – did she make it out?” The thought of Elena laying there hurting somewhere in some throbbing corridor of this place is almost too much for me to bear. Or worse, laying there dead –

I break the thought off like a plank of rotten wood. She is _not_ dead. She can’t be.

I almost missed the calculating look that had flashed across Makado’s eye, and I realize I’ve grabbed onto her arm rather tightly. I let go but even so I can’t stop myself from biting my lip out of sheer worry. “She’s fine,” Makado says finally.

“She is?”

“Yeah. She came stumbling into Control a few days ago, they got her up to the surface, far as I know she’s still in the infirmary. That’s how I knew to come down and get you, she told us what was going on.”

“Oh thank god,” I blurt. I hug my knees to my chest and squeeze my eyes shut. _She’s okay_ , I tell myself. I can feel the tears coming but at least this time they’re out of relief. After a moment I hear Makado sigh again and then she shifts closer to me and puts her arm around me.

“You must really like her,” Makado ventures after a moment. I laugh but it comes out as more of a sniff.

“Yeah,” I say after a moment. “Yeah, I think I – I do, yeah.”

For a short while it feels as though Makado doesn’t know what to say. Then finally she shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she tells me.

“For what?”

“For dragging you into this,” she says. “I never thought that all of this would happen, it was going to be just _routine_ ,” she says, massaging her temples. “The copepods, they never would have done anything if it wasn’t for the damn Leechman, they never would have attacked, nobody would have had to die…”

“It isn’t something you could have predicted,” I say gently. Makado continues on as though I hadn’t spoken.

“And then Erica, goddam _Erica_ , Christ…”

“She was doing what she thought was the right thing,” I say. “I don’t think she meant for things to go the way they did.”

“That doesn’t really make it any better,” she groans. I think about Peter again and wish fervently that he were here. I lean back and navigate my arm around so that now I’m the one holding Makado.

“I’m sorry about Peter,” I tell her.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah, I’m sorry too. It sounded like a rotten way to die.” I look over at Makado, look at her carefully. She glances over at me after a moment. “What?”

“Nothing,” I say finally. I swing off of the bed, get up and stretch. “I feel good,” I observe.

“Yeah,” Makado says, rising to her feet as well. “With that much ballast in your system you’ll probably be riding pretty high for a couple of days at least. Now, be careful though, because –“

“What are we going to do about the FBI?” I ask her. I undo the hospital gown and let it fall, gaze down at myself. There’s a ragged weal of a scar along my ribs on the right side but it already looks long-healed. I put my weight down on my other foot and nearly stumble. Makado gets up and rushes to me but I caught myself on the railing around the cot.

“You alright?”

“Yeah, my leg, it –“

“I was going to tell you,” she says. “The autodoc wasn’t able to set it properly. You’d fallen on a calcium deposit and your tibia and fibula broke. It cleaned out the fragments of bone but there wasn’t enough left to just set it and let it heal, so it put in a synthetic replacement, used ballast to meld your skin and muscle around it, but that leg is going to be weak for a long time.”

I sit back on the bed, reach down and feel the leg. It doesn’t feel much different but whatever caused the weakness is still lurking inside there, maybe a muscle not connected properly, maybe something else. I can feel a dull, bone-deep throb of pain, steady and regular and hard-edged, just waiting to boil up to the surface the second I put a foot wrong. I shake my head.

“I’m going to need like, a boot or something. If we have to climb out of here –“

“We’ll figure it out, it’s okay. I just wanted to tell you before you, you know, figured that you were totally fine.”

“What about this?” I ask, turning to her, pointing to the scar across my ribcage. “I know that wasn’t there.”

“Just repair work on a rib, I think. I read the summary it spat out after it was done but I’m pretty sure it didn’t reinflate your lung by going through your rib cage.”

“Jesus Christ,” I murmur, craning my neck and squinting down at it.

“Are you breathing alright?”

With only a little trepidation I take a deep breath and hold it, then let it blow out long and slow. There’s a little pain when I hold it, in the right lung only, and then as I’m nearing the tail end of the breath it rattles somewhere deep down, but I shake my head. “A little rough but it’s okay.”

“You need to know that you’re still a little, you know, doped up. Ballast would have kept most of the pain down and kept your head pretty clear but that’s going to come back with a vengeance if you overdo it.”

I nod. “Alright, I get it. Take it easy for probably the next year or so.”

“There’s an extra jumpsuit over on that chair.”

And so I get dressed, and eat a nutrient bar and Makado shows me around DUSA. I have to hang on to her every now and then when my leg threatens to buckle beneath me but she bears it without complaint and lets me hobble around with my arm around her shoulder like we’re old friends.

DUSA looks just like all of the other ranger stations I’ve been in so far, if maybe a little cleaner. She shows me the door to the room that has the big scary capital-letter Contingency Plan inside of it, but even though I ask she won’t let me in to see it.

Outside the inch-thick windows the Pit’s flesh is squeezed tight against the walls. A few small stents hold it back here and there to let a metal gantry and corridor file through and out into a vent but otherwise it’s like this place was just cut open and the small lozenge shape of DUSA was slipped in and then the Pit grew back around it. Unlike some of the other ranger stations this one is tall rather than wide, maybe four or five floors of various facilities. There’s a dormitory, a kitchen and eating area, the small infirmary with the autodoctor, now revealed as a squat, many-legged machine a little like an MRI machine and a metal octopus had a baby, and on the fourth floor room after room of workstations with dark screens and dusty keyboards. Servers lie dark and dormant, tucked against the walls and tied down with cloth straps.

We end up sitting on the roof of the place, after Makado opens the hatch and lets a ladder telescope down from the recessed sheath it was hiding in. She helps me up it methodically and then we’re there, the fleshy wall of the ceiling barely a dozen feet above our heads. It gives me a sense of disorientation somehow, like I’ve just crawled upside down from the bottom of DUSA and am now standing with my feet glued to the ceiling, staring down at the floor. I blink hard and it passes.

Makado leans out over the railing and groans. “Everything’s fucked,” she growls. “This whole place ought to be full of people, getting things ready for when that crystal gets here. Instead it’s just me and – and you.” She’d gotten more and more pessimistic the further into our little tour we’d gone. I reach over and put my arm around her. I feel rather comradely, I feel like laughing. I guess I had convinced myself that I was going to die and now that I’ve received an unexpected reprieve I can’t hardly believe it.

“It’ll be okay,” I tell her. “What’s going on with the FBI?”

“Admin’s stalling them, but they’ll come back with a writ or a warrant or something and when they get their hands on our files there’ll be some shit. Right now they’re fighting with the DoI guys over jurisdiction, I think.”

“DoI?”

“Department of the Interior,” she says, waving her hand. “Normally that’d be who would handle this type of thing, they’re in charge of national parks, but the FBI want in because this isn’t a park any more, I think technically it’s a preserve or something and that’s different…somehow. Not sure on that one.”

I nod. I start to say something else but Makado heaves a huge sigh, glances sidelong at me. “There might be some trouble but I think we’ll be able to get you out of it,” she tells me, and I laugh.

“I’m more worried about you. Klaus said they were gunning for you, that you were going to go down hard.”

She rolls her eyes. “We’ll have to see,” she says. “Especially if he’s dead, it might be a little more difficult for that to happen.”

I get a little wrench in my stomach as she says it but I swallow hard and let it pass. I did what I had to and if I hadn’t I would be dead.

I wonder for how long after this I’m going to be seeing that grin and that knife in my dreams.

“So he was a mole, then?” I ask. “That’s basically what he was saying.”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “He’s been here for a long time, Klaus has. I don’t think he ever was, you know, an undercover FBI agent or anything, I think he was just their guy on the inside. An informant. I read his personnel file, he’s done time before. It makes sense that there was someone giving them information but…” she trails off. “It’s hard to say,” she finishes. “It’s too bad, though. Too bad we didn’t get that crystal. We could have done a lot of good with it. If they just hadn’t shattered the first one…”

We sit there on the roof of DUSA for a long while, until Makado finally groans and gets to her feet. I glance up at her and then take the offered hand, let her pull me up. “What happens now?” I ask.

“Now?” she laughs. “Now we get out of here.”

* * *

Getting out is easier than getting in. Makado gets me into a ranger suit and we march off into the wet, tumescent depths of the Pit. Except, as Makado explains to me, we aren’t nearly as deep as I think. DUSA is far higher depth-wise than the dense fungal hell I thought I was going to die in. When I asked her how I had gotten here, then, she explained, as though it were simple, that she had just taken an IAV.

Peter had mentioned them briefly, the acronym standing for something like ‘Internal Anatomy Vehicle’ or similar. I’d even seen some, parked down below in the meager garage at the control center, what feels like ages ago, lurking like snub-nosed, aerodynamic lozenges, there in the dark. But here is one of them, its big chunky wheels soaked in gore, its prow stained red from apparent hours pushing panicked through venterial folds, rushing to DUSA with me in the passenger seat, strapped in as tightly as Makado had dared.

“It was tight,” she tells me. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it. I went as fast as I possibly could but it was still a near thing.”

“It was those fucking lizards down there,” I mutter. “I touched one, they’re covered in some kind of – poisonous goop, I don’t know what –“

“Yeah. The autodoc scrubbed your system and breathing clean air for long enough got the spores out as well, but you’re just riding on the ballast right now,” she reminds me, pressing a combination on a keypad near the low-slung waist of the vehicle and then stepping back to let the hatch open. It smells like oil and disinfectant but I clamber in eagerly. The interior is space-age, or at least it would have been in the 90s or so. The interior lights are all in red for some reason; when I ask Makado about it she explains it’s to help maintain low-light vision while still letting you see. When she grins at me her teeth reflect back cherry-stained and I have to shake my head to keep from thinking of it as blood.

The ride is bumpy but uneventful. Once Makado flattens something that looks like an overgrown louse the size of a small pig. It shrieks as the wheels crunch over it. I glance over at her and she shrugs. “We’re in a hurry,” she explains.

After that we lapse into a comfortable silence that grows slowly more frosty the closer we get to the Control Center. I can see it approaching on the three-dimensional map readout on the dashboard, a blinking line of waypoints leading us back to the garage. Makado’s answers become shorter and shorter and eventually I just stop trying to make conversation at all. She’s just tired, I tell myself.

After we park Makado helps me out of the IAV and guides me up a set of stairs and into the Center. My leg twinges a little whenever I really put weight on it but if I limp it isn’t nearly as bad. The stairs are rough though, and I have to cling on to her and take them one step at a time just to get up them.

Over the last hour of driving or so I developed a little bit of a headache but when I mentioned it to Makado she nodded and explained it was probably just the ballast starting to wear off. It’d keep me going for a while longer but I’d need to rest and let my body heal. I had grinned. “Fine with me,” I told her, and she offered me a faint smile and then turned her attention back to the wet, bloody folds ahead of us, nudging the nose of the IAV through one muscular ribbed sphincter at a time.

The stairs take us to sort of a tool room or machine shop, and then we pass out into a hallway and then up some stairs that I recognize. Beyond the next inch-thick submarine-style door is the control room, still as messy as a few days ago, with two or three of the geeks present before still in residence. They look up when Makado enters but make no comment other than a perfunctory greeting or two; clearly we’re expected. Then I step into the room and catch nothing but eyeballs.

One of the nerds frowns. “Wait,” he asks Makado, staring at me, “is that…?”

I start to answer but Makado nods, shuffling me along with her hand in the small of my back. “Yes, it is,” she assures him, but the look he gives me after she does so is more than a little confusing. I glance at Makado but before I can say anything there is a burst of pain in my leg that forces a groan from my lips and makes me stumble. Makado catches me before I fall and then I’m good again. My leg feels like it’s made of glass, or rather that it’s two glass blocks stacked on top of each other, and if I’m not extremely careful about how and where I put my weight they slide apart and the most _excruciating -_

“You okay?” she asks, and I nod.

“Yeah,” I grunt. “Once I’m out of here I will be.”

“They already called the elevator down,” she tells me. “I radioed ahead for us. Twenty minutes and you’re through.”

“And I can see Elena?” I ask. I feel a little like a baby saying it but it just tumbled out when I opened my mouth to say something a little less pathetic like ‘thank goodness’ or similar. Makado stiffens next to me fractionally, and I frown. “Are you –“

“Yes, you can see Elena.”

We hobble out of the control room and down the corridor to the gondolas. I don’t even know how to feel; I don’t even know what time it is, whether or not it’ll be light out. Something about the way Makado took too long to answer has me worried, though, and I glance over at the woman as we make our halting way towards the waiting gondola car. She’s gotten progressively quieter as we neared the control station they’d put in in place of the Lower Visitor Center, and though we’d kept up fairly lively small talk up until that point the conversation died by the time we had actually made it inside.

Her jaw is clenched tight and though I can’t see her one good eye from the side I’m on, I can see her brow is downcast and furrowed. I lick my lips and try to quell the sudden stab of fear that’s gone through me. “Mak, is Elena…is she okay?”

Makado opens the door to the gondola and helps me inside. “She’s fine,” she tells me. “Just try to rest. Sit down on the floor if you need to.”

As soon as she says it, as if on cue, a wave of exhaustion passes through me and it’s all I can do to keep myself standing. Makado shuts the door and fiddles with the controls for a moment and then with a sickening lurch we’re moving upwards, and with the motion it’s as though all the tension exits my body. Even the twinging in my calf doesn’t seem quite as bad now that we’re moving. I look at Makado and she offers me a tight smile. “See?” she says. “We’ll get you out of here soon.”

“And Elena’s alright?”

Makado doesn’t meet my eyes. “She’s fine,” she tells me again, but the way she says it just makes me worry more.

“Do you promise?” I ask her. She looks up from her wrist computer.

“Hmm?”

“Do you promise,” I say slowly, “that Elena’s alright?”

Makado stares at me and I see something dark and unnameable shifting behind her one remaining eye. After what feels like entirely too long she nods. “Say it,” I prompt her. “Please.” I know it’s irrational and stupid but the way she’s acting is like she’s hiding something from me, it’s like she’s –

“Roan, calm down,” she says. Her voice is smooth and serene. “Elena’s fine.”

“Promise me she is,” I whisper.

Makado takes what feels like a moment longer to respond than she should. “Okay,” she says finally. “I promise.”

“Okay,” I say. I try to will myself back to the relaxed, relieved state I’d been in as soon as the gondola had started moving, but I can’t find it. Makado’s put enough worry into me that I feel like a spiky ball of it, hard-edged and serrated. I eventually do take her advice and sit on the floor and rest a while.

I try to make conversation with her but the answers she gives me are flat and eventually we both let it peter out. I assume she’s nervous about the FBI and the investigation I’m sure she’ll go through. I already told her on the way up that I didn’t mind hanging around and giving a statement or whatever else they need exactly, but it barely seemed to make an impact on her. Maybe it’s Peter, and if it is, I don’t know what to say to her that could possibly make it better.

But I go ahead and stick my foot in my mouth anyway. “Mak,” I say, breaking the – well, not silence exactly, for the grinding and swaying of the gondola is far from quiet, but my words still seem overly loud inside the car, “are you okay?”

She blows a breath out and looks at me. She starts to say something, then stops. “I’m sorry,” she ends up telling me, and I frown.

“What for?” I ask. “I know it didn’t – it didn’t go how it was supposed to but none of it was your fault, you couldn’t have predicted –“

“No,” she says. Her voice has a catch to it as though she might start crying. “It isn’t that. It’s – look, can I show you something?”

“Sure.” I’ve got no clue where she’s going with this. Outside the window I can see the first hint of real sunlight that I’ve glimpsed in probably about four or five days, pouring down into the Pit like an orange cascade. It’s far-off and dim but it’s real. Looks to be somewhere around the middle of the day or so. Makado reaches down for me and with her help I manage to clamber to my feet. I’m still a little unsteady on the right leg but I think it’s getting better. I think I just needed to rest it for a while. “What is it?”

“I’ll show you,” she says. “Turn around real quick.”

“What are you –“

“Just do it,” she nods. Her eyes flick over to the window then back to me. “You’ll miss it.”

So of course I turn, not thinking anything of it. I hear her shift and then come and stand just behind me. There’s a clink of metal, a small subtle sound. I don’t see anything out the window.

I start to glance back at her and then she grabs my wrist and tugs it backwards and snaps half of a pair of handcuffs around it. “What!” I blurt, jerking away from her before she can grab my other hand. Her face is tight and calculating.

“Give me your fucking hand,” she snarls.

“Makado, what the fuck –“

She punches me. I see it coming but I don’t react in time. Her fist slams into my gut and the breath whooshes out of me in one go, folds me over like a pressed shirt. I reach for her and try to slap her back but she grabs my hand and then she’s got me by the wrist – her grip is like iron. I bring my leg up and knee her in the hip and she grunts, but then she draws her leg back and kicks me in my newly repaired calf and I feel something give, something bone-deep, and the explosion of pain is so intense that I scream. I draw my leg back and falter and then fall to the floor, landing heavily on my elbow, and then Makado grabs me and heaves me over onto my stomach, jarring my leg again and forcing another scream from between my teeth as she cuffs the other wrist.

“What the fuck!” I yell, as soon as I’ve caught my breath.

“I’m sorry,” she says, breathing heavily, smoothing off the front of her suit. “I’m really, really sorry.”

“You fucking bitch!” I shriek. “You fucking bitch, get me out of these fucking cuffs!”

“It wasn’t anything personal,” she says, sounding more like she’s trying to convince herself than she is trying to convince me.

“You bitch!” I say again. I apparently become rather uninventive when I get stabbed in the back. Makado growls, a low wordless snarl, and then rolls me over onto my back. The cuffs cut into my wrists, sandwiched between myself and the floor, and I cry out.

“Shut the fuck up,” she tells me. Her voice is icy calm and that scares me more than anything else she could have said. “I have to give someone to the FBI. I have to let someone take the fall.”

I open my mouth to say something and she puts her booted foot over my throat and presses down gently. I can feel the blunt cleats on the bottom dig into my neck. I try to wriggle away but she just puts a little more of her weight onto it and then I can’t breathe and so I stop, staring at her desperately, hoping she has the sense not to choke me.

“There is too much at stake right now,” she says, “for me to go down for something as fucking stupid as human trafficking. Especially when all I did was look the other way while Peter did his dumb little humanitarian gesture. So you’re going to go down for me. That’s all. There’s still a chance I can get that crystal back but I won’t be able to if I’m rotting in a federal prison somewhere.”

She takes her foot off my throat and I heave the air in while I still can. “Tell me,” I wheeze. Makado looks down at me. “Tell me you weren’t lying about Elena. Tell me she’s okay.”

Makado is silent for a long while. “I lied,” she says finally, in a small voice. “I knew you wouldn’t come with me if you thought she was still in the Pit. I don’t know where she is or if she’s alive. The tracker in her suit is dead and nobody’s heard from her in three days.”

The gondola grinds to a halt and the doors hiss open, and sunlight and fresh air pour in. I hardly notice. Makado steps over me and walks out while I lay there, my hands cuffed behind my back, bawling my eyes out, and then three men with badges and pistols come in and pick me up and carry me off somewhere. I don’t notice where, I don’t see it. All I can see, my eyes squeezed shut in a vain attempt to keep the tears from leaking out, is Elena, poor Elena, trapped somewhere at the bottom of the Pit and calling out my name, not knowing I’ll never come.


	3. Chapter 3

The FBI agent reclines the front seat in the big black Tahoe and gives me a look like I’m a little girl being stubborn. My nose is still a little stuffy from all the crying I’ve been doing, and my leg feels swollen and crooked and wrong, but the time for all that is past now. I take a deep breath and let it out and refuse to meet his gaze, glare out the tinted window at the fading afternoon.

Outside there are two more FBI men in big baggy blue windbreakers, chatting casually. One of them is smoking a cigarette, and as I watch him bring it to his mouth I feel a little gnarled pang of want for it really has been so _long_ since I last had one, and after everything I’ve gone through –

“How’s your leg?” the agent in the SUV with me asks, and I look round at him but don’t answer. He’s a big, broad man, probably somewhere in his forties or maybe his late thirties. His tone is calm and mild but his voice is deep enough that it feels like it ought to be accompanied by a rumbling vibrato I can feel in my bones.

My leg is okay. Makado knew exactly where and how to kick me, it seems; after the FBI agents picked me up and carried me out of the gondola Makado got them to take me straight to the infirmary where a small, stone-faced woman looked it over and tutted at how they were treating me, saying that it probably won’t heal right, but they got her to just shoot me full of painkillers and throw a boot on it. After that I was able to walk, at least a little bit; I found to my immense surprise that with the boot I was actually able to put some weight on my right leg without it folding under me or my calf snapping in half. I examined it as best as I was able on the walk over to the parking lot and discovered that instead of the mangled wreck I was half-expecting there was just a rough scrape from the cleats on the bottom of Makado’s boot and only the slightest misalignment of the broad flat bone there. I could feel, I discovered, the part where my bone melded into the synthetic replacement the autodoctor had put in, a little ridged scoriation dividing the two.

“I have some ibuprofen,” he says, reaching into the pocket of his windbreaker, “if you need it.”

“I’m fine.”

My voice is dry from lack of use. I lick my lips, make a little cough in the back of my throat. He shrugs, puts the bottle away. “Suit yourself,” he says.

Another five minutes or so go by. I pointedly ignore him. Eventually he clears his throat. “It’s going to be a lot easier on you,” he tells me, “if you talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Oh, I disagree,” he says. “We’ve got a lot to talk about. Ever since Miss Veret gave us a call and told us what you were up to, we’ve had a lot of questions for you. I think you’ll find that you’d prefer me to be the one asking them.”

“Is that a threat?” I ask him, and he laughs.

“It is whatever you make of it, Miss Dzilenski.” He stumbles over the frontloaded jumble of consonants, overemphasizes the ‘e’ sound in the middle. Duh-zil- _een_ -ski. Almost makes me wince.

“Alright,” I say. “What did Makado say I had been up to, then?”

It would probably be smarter not to talk at all, but sitting here in the blasting a/c in the back of the Tahoe is making me sleepy. It feels like I haven’t had a chance to actually sit and rest for what feels like ages, even though just earlier today I was just waking up from a day-and-a-half nap after surgery. I’d gone through the pumped-full-of-energy phase and then the ballast had worn off and I’d gone through the splitting-migraine phase on the way up and now at this point I just feel hollow and brittle and empty. Even though it’s cowardly I try not to think of Elena and how I’ve abandoned her, I try not to think of Makado and what she’s done, but it’s futile. Rage and despair course over me in alternating waves and I haven’t a clue as to how to adequately deal with either.

The FBI man offers me a tissue and I realize with a start that I’ve nearly begun crying again. I wipe at my eyes as best I can with my cuffed hands and leave him there, hand outstretched, until he sighs and takes his hand back, tosses the wadded tissue on the floor. “How’d you end up here?” he asks me. I stare back at him. He reaches over, takes a slim manila folder from the center console, leafs through it. “Not a lot on you in here,” he says. “Except for that whole thing with your father.”

I stiffen.

“Must have been hard,” he says, neutrally.

I know I’m being baited and I ought to stay quiet but I can’t stop myself. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” I tell him, “so you should just _shut up –_ “

“On the contrary,” he says smoothly, turning a stapled, glossy page and squinting at the next. The first page hangs over the edge of the folder and I can see through it to the other side, see the painfully familiar mugshot that’s been etched into my brain, little twelve-year-old me, her eyes red from crying, trying hard to keep a stiff upper lip, staring defiantly into the camera, still wearing the lumberjack shirt she’d begged her dad buy for her as soon as they made it to Illinois and the nights started to get cold. “I know a lot about it,” the FBI man continues. “I’ve got the entire report right here.”

“If you read the report,” I say, trying to keep my voice level, “you know that by now it’s ancient history. It happened fourteen years ago.”

“Yes,” he says, “and now fourteen years later you’re in another mess. I suppose you’re going to blame somebody else this time as well?”

The words strike me with about the subtlety of a sledgehammer but I still stiffen in the backseat, my fists clenching so hard that my nails dig into my palms. “Fuck you,” I blurt. He continues on as though he didn’t hear me.

“I don’t know what exactly they’re planning on charging you with, but I know it’s at least a few dozen counts of manslaughter, and possibly a couple of murder charges. Then there’s all the human trafficking you and your partner Peter Caum were doing. Did you really think you’d be able to get away with that?”

My mouth dropped open about halfway through. “So that’s how it is,” I say. I feel like I’ve been struck by lightning; my heart is going about a million miles an hour and all the hair is standing up on my arms. I feel claustrophobic suddenly, here in the back of the SUV, my hands cuffed together, my leg throbbing in time with my heartbeat.

The FBI man’s eyes flash beneath his glasses. “That’s how what is?”

“Makado is trying to blame all this on me,” I tell him, knowing that it’s futile, that maybe it’s even actively detrimental to say anything, but I – I can’t just say nothing, I can’t just –

“Are you saying that she’s the one responsible for this?”

I swallow and nod.

“That Makado Veret,” he says, tossing the folder to the side and fixing me with his full attention, “the Chief of Security for the Permian Basin Recovery and Superorganism Containment Corporation, _that_ Makado, has really been trying to smuggle people _inside_ the Pit, with the help of a disgruntled ex-Park Ranger and mental patient, for…no real apparent purpose other than to fleece desperate people of their money?”

“Yes,” I say softly. It’s pointless. He isn’t going to believe me.

“And you are,” he continues, “the same Roan Dzilenski who has a documented history of lying to law enforcement authorities?”

“I was _twelve!_ ”

“So you aren’t denying it? That you have lied to the police before?”

“I –“

“I mean,” he says, speading his hands, “it was a juvenile offense. And it was overturned. You got off scot free.”

“I did _not_ get off scot free,” I tell him. “I’m tired of this. You’ve got the fucking report, you can read it. Either arrest me or don’t.”

“Fine,” he says. “If that’s what you’d like me to do.”

I lick my lips. “Look,” I say, trying to think of how to phrase it, how possibly I can tell him and get him to believe me. He gives me an expectant look. “Look,” I say, a little more softly, “this is all fine, but right now there’s someone down there inside the Pit who’s hurt. Someone who might die if I can’t get to her. And if you arrest me –“

The FBI man laughs, cutting me off, and rolls the window down to signal to the other two men in windbreakers. The tall, thin one with the cigarette tosses it on the black asphalt and grinds it out with his foot, and then he gets in next to me. I can still smell it on him. And then the other gets in the front seat and, after a quiet, murmured conversation with the man who’d just been grilling me, pulls us out of the parking lot and onto the curving road that reaches around the back of the ranger barracks and over to the main road back to Gumption. I feel as though I’m going to be sick.

The sky is terribly blue and for a long while I have a hard time recognizing it, I stare at the clouds passing by outside the window and wonder at them. The world feels strange when it isn’t pitch-dark and smelling of meat.

And, god, Elena –

I’m done crying. I can’t do anything for her now. I – I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t see it coming, I didn’t see that Makado was just using me.

I suppose I will process all of this later, in a jail cell somewhere. Right now I don’t have the ability to handle any more. I lean my forehead against the cool glass next to me and shut my eyes. I’d rather think about something else.

* * *

“Now remember,” my father is telling me, “it’s going to be hard to pull that trigger, but if you just squeeze it steadily it’ll be okay.”

“But daddy,” I start, but he just ruffles my hair like he always does and adjusts the revolver so that the two little legs stuck to the barrel sink a little deeper into the berm we’re both laying on.

“Now go ahead,” he tells me, his voice gentle, “and line up those two little bits there with this one in the front.”

I close my left eye and peer down the ridged metal spine of the thing. Just holding it makes me nervous, it’s like holding a power tool, like holding the big reciprocating saw he keeps down in the garage for his woodworking. It’s heavy and weighty and purposeful. “Okay,” I murmur.

“You’ve got them lined up? The one in the front should be in the middle of the rear two, and it shouldn’t be higher than the rear two.”

“Yes.”

“Alright, now, line the whole thing up with that beer bottle over there.”

“Which one?”

“The Blue Moon bottle over there on the left.”

I shift the gun over a little and then line it up again. “Okay,” I mutter. The little green bead in the front rests just above the label, but now it’s up too high, it’s poking above the line made by the back two bits.

“Remember to focus on the sights, not on the target. If you focus on the target you won’t be able to tell whether the sights aren’t aligned. Keep your eyes right here,” my dad tells me, pointing to the front of the pistol. I nod.

“Got it.”

“Okay. I’m going to move the cylinder now so that the hammer is over the chamber with the live bullet in it. When you pull that trigger the gun will fire. Got it?”

I swallow hard. I can see the back of the cartridge in the little cutout for it on the left side of the gun. My dad told me it was so you can see whether it had already been fired but I don’t know how that works. As I watch he reaches down and moves it so that it’s in line with the barrel. “Daddy,” I say, “I don’t know if –“

“Hey, it’s going to be fine. Now, it’s going to have a hard kick, but I’m going to be right here holding it with you, okay?”

“Okay,” I say again. Down there, maybe about fifty feet away or so, the sunlight is glinting off the darkened glass of the Blue Moon bottle. My father places his hands loosely over mine; his skin is calloused and rough. He is a carpenter but only during the day, at night he writes, holed up in the den with the door cracked open so if I want to I can sneak up and peek in, see him tapping away at the enormous computer with the cathode-ray screen, the big stuffed buck’s head on the wall just behind him, angled just like his, echoing his. I want to write like he does when I get older.

His hands are just over mine. They’re very warm, and so big compared to mine. I still have a band-aid on the ring finger of my left hand from where I tripped and cut it open on the ground outside the motel yesterday. Dad was proud of me for not crying about it but I wouldn’t have cried about something like that for a long time. Even this young I’m serious, more serious than either of my parents. Right now my father is being very serious and it isn’t something I’m used to. It makes me feel nervous, like I’ll do something wrong.

“Whenever you’re ready, keep the sights lined up and pull the trigger back slowly. It’s got a bit of a weight to it so you’ll have to squeeze hard, but it’ll shoot.”

And so I pull the trigger back slowly. My hand is shaking a little but that’s just from how hard I’m holding the gun. As the trigger moves the little metal lever on the back of the gun moves too, and I glance over at my dad. “Is that supposed to –“ I start, but he’s already nodding at me.

“That’s the hammer, that’s what actually hits the cartridge to make it fire. It has to drop down onto it to do that, so when you pull the trigger what you’re doing is bringing the hammer back and then dropping it. Go ahead and shoot, baby.”

I keep pulling and the hammer keeps going back and back and back and what I realize is going to happen is that there will be a point where it’s all the way back and then it’ll fall and the gun will go off and scare me half to death, and I keep anticipating it and it doesn’t come and eventually it’s too much and I ease off of the trigger. My dad stares down at me wondering if something’s wrong, takes his hands off of my hands and starts to lean over, and the thought of having to explain all this to him is far too unpalatable for me, so instead I squeeze my eyes shut and jerk the trigger back as far as it will go, and the gun roars so loud that for a moment I wonder whether I’m even wearing the big bulky earmuffs my dad handed to me.

The pistol leaps out of my hands and then something slams into my face and I cry out and clap my hands to my nose. The revolver is lying there on the berm, kicked over onto one of its little legs, and my nose is bleeding. My dad looks like he doesn’t know whether he wants to yell at me or cheer for me. Instead he just hugs me to him before I can start crying and points down at the beer bottles. “You did it,” is all he tells me, and when I look I see that the Blue Moon bottle, amber-hued and glossy, has disappeared, and even though I’ve gotten blood all down the front of my new plaid lumberjack shirt, I can’t stop staring at the place it would have been, can’t stop grinning at the knowledge that _I did that_.

* * *

The glass jostles against my forehead and my eyes flick open. I’d drifted away for a second there. Then the noise begins and the man driving slams on the brakes, sending us screeching to a halt. “What the fuck was that?” he cries.

I know what it is, of course – it’s the Pit. What else would it be? What else can open its gaping mouth and scream like that, scream from its belly, miles and miles and miles deep, channel the sound out into a pinprick-tiny orifice and make it shriek for kilometers? The noise is throbbingly deep, rattling into our bones and setting my teeth vibrating unpleasantly, but also somehow manages to screech upwards into a high keening wail that drags on and on and on…

The FBI men look shaken, at least. I’d heard groans and moans and shrieks like this down in the Pit, but none quite so angry, and definitely none as loud. It makes me wonder if there’s something different about this or if the sound is muffled, down there in the Pit, muffled by the flesh everywhere. Maybe it carries differently.

There is another low resounding thump and again the ground shakes. I freeze. If we can feel it here on the surface –

The FBI men glance at each other, and the one in the passenger seat, the one who’d been interrogating me, nods. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he tells the driver, who puts the SUV back in gear and starts off again down the road, moving at a faster clip than before. He isn’t quite gunning it but he’s getting close. The one in back sitting next to me leans forward.

“Did they say anything about this?” he asks. “Is it like a test or something? I heard –“

I never hear what he heard, though, before the ground erupts like a bomb maybe two hundred yards to our left and a vast stream of – of _something_ hurls upwards into the sky. The driver cries out in shock and for a moment all of us are just staring out the left side of the SUV, watching as a nauseatingly pale pillar of flesh hovers there, sticking out of the ground at an obtuse angle, quivering in the waning sunlight. It must reach a couple hundred feet into the air at least, and it’s as thick as a redwood, or maybe even a couple of redwoods, it’s hard to tell from this distance. It curls inwards on itself and slams into the ground and begins scrabbling around on the ground, splintering trees and bushes and rocks, crushing them beneath itself.

“Makado was right,” I breathe, watching the tentacle writhe like a blind, pale worm. “She was right, it _is_ waking up.”

“What did you say?” the man in the passenger seat asks, but before I can repeat myself there is another echoing roar and another tentacle, a smaller one this time, bursts out of the ground just before us. The driver screams a profanity and tries to turn but the big fat SUV is too damn slow. We strike it at an angle instead and it is just enough to flip the car.

It all happens incredibly quickly. I’m very lucky that the man who got in next to me buckled me in; he neglected to do the same for himself and got tossed around the cabin like a ragdoll, slamming into the ceiling and then falling through into the back and rattling around back there like a roulette ball. The two in front are a little luckier; they both had buckled up but I see the one in the passenger seat strike his head hard against the window next to him, hard enough that the window cracks, and when his head reels back I see a flash of bright red blood mottled in his hair and dripping down his forehead. The driver is still tugging desperately at the wheel, his instincts screaming at him to do _something_ at least, but it’s useless – we flip end over end three times before the car settles onto its side and comes to a halt.

Aside from nearly being strangled by my seatbelt, I come out of it okay. I knocked my leg against the front seat a few times but with the boot on it isn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, and then when the front windscreen burst inwards I did end up with a few cuts on my face, I think. My nose is throbbing again and even though the autodoc set it for me I wonder if I’ve gone and broken it for the second time in about a day and a half.

I think I screamed, that’s all; it’s like my brain shut down as soon as we flipped and I was simply running on automatic, no conscious thought required. I remember bringing my hands, still cuffed together, up to protect my face, and I remember clenching just about every muscle in my body tight enough to leave me with a lingering ache in my abs once we rolled to a stop, but somehow I haven’t done myself any lasting damage.

It takes me only a couple seconds to realize that this might be my big break, and then I spring into action, slamming my fingers down on the release for the seat belt and rocketing out of the SUV as quickly as I can. The driver yells at me, apparently still conscious as well, and I snap a terrified glance back at him, but he’s trapped – I can see now standing on the outside that his door is crumpled inwards and jammed into the frame, and what’s more it doesn’t look like he’s able to undo his seat belt, although I can’t tell whether it’s because it’s jammed too or because the man is injured.

Behind me the roars continue unabated. There is the faint ratcheting wail of a siren coming from the facility, over the lip of the hill, just there to my right.

The man with the glasses who cracked his head on the window, he has the key to my cuffs. I sprint around the back of the truck, tear the passenger door open as quickly as I can. He falls out, lands on his belly in the dirt, and then I am rummaging through his pockets; not here in the jacket, not on the other side of the jacket, not in the left back pocket…

I can feel my panic mounting as I rifle through his things, trying to ignore the angry cries of the man in the driver’s seat, telling me to stop, telling me that I’m going to be in really fucking big trouble if I don’t come around and help him get out of the damn truck. I shut him out, I don’t even look at him. Where is the fucking key? If I can’t find it, if it’s fallen out of his pocket somewhere when the SUV flipped –

There is a raw, wet noise next to me and I glance over. The tip of the tentacle, glossy with slime and bleeding from a dozen skin-deep cuts, from rocks and sticks and just abrasion with the ground, is nuzzling at the deflated rear tire of the SUV. It’s insane how _normal_ it seems to me. A month ago I would have figured I was going insane if I had seen something like this grubbing around on the ground like someone trying to reach a potato chip they’ve dropped on the floor. Where is that _fucking_ key? Goddam it –

I take a step, dragging the FBI man with me, or at least trying to, because the fucker is _heavy_ , and immediately the tentacle jolts in my direction. I feel a scream catch in my throat but I manage to clap a hand to my mouth and stop it. The sound? No, that doesn’t make any sense, the thing’s skin is smooth and clear and bereft of anything close to being an ear. Vibrations then, that must be it.

I eye the thing. The end is blunt and about as narrow as a baseball bat but it widens out to about as wide around as a tree trunk a little further down. It’s obviously very strong; rippling bands of muscle shift beneath its thin skin. If it got wrapped around my leg –

“You fucking bitch!” the driver curses at me. He’s still yanking fruitlessly at the seat belt. I see the tentacle’s skin twitch with each word, and then it snakes its way under the SUV. “You bitch! I swear to god, if you don’t come over here - !”

I have one last pocket to search. Rear right. Wallet, what feels like a package of breath mints or chewing gum, a piece of paper…no keys. I shove my hand in deeper, all the way to the bottom, and then I find it, the tiny metal key brushing against my fingers. My heart jolts in my chest and I pull it out as quickly as I can and then try to unlock them myself, but it’s no use, I can’t reach it. “Fuck,” I murmur, out loud, and then glance carefully at the tentacle. It’s wrapped itself all the way around the SUV. At this point the man inside has seen it. It sounds like he’s having a panic attack.

I start to back away slowly, just as the tentacle flexes and lifts the SUV into the air. “Holy _shit_ ,” I murmur before I get a grip and shut up. The tentacle seems satisfied with its prize, though – it doesn’t pay any attention to me. There’s more commotion inside the SUV and then – I jump – a few gunshots. I see them slap into the tentacle’s flesh, puffing out sprays of blood, but it’s entirely futile. The tentacle flexes and crushes the SUV with the ease of someone crushing a can of Coke and then it whips back down into the dirt, still clutching the SUV, and then they both are gone.

My heartbeat is very loud in my ears. The enormous tentacle off in the distance is still scrabbling around someplace else, pointed off in the other direction from me. My hand have gotten very sweaty and I’m scared I might drop the key someplace, but I haven’t got anywhere else to carry it. I take a step tentatively, cringing in anticipation, waiting for another tentacle to burst out of the ground and scoop me up, but when none are forthcoming, I break into a hobbling sprint and make for the facility. I have to find someone who’ll be willing to uncuff me, who might be willing to help me get back down into the Pit so that I can find Elena –

The thoughts die in midstride. I crest the ridge and stare down at the wreckage below me. There are three more tentacles of roughly the same size as the first rooting around the wreckage of the administration building, which looks as though it’s been peeled open like a tin of sardines. Before me, down on the road, a Humvee speeds by, and then another. There are people rushing all about the sedative plant, and I wonder if they’ve done anything, if there even is anything they _can_ do. Can they turn it up to 11, pump even more sedative into the thing? Would that even work, does it have a tolerance for it?

The exclusion plate, at least what I can see of it from this vantage, is cracked into three pieces, and beneath is just pale skin basking in the orangey sunset.

As I watch, one of the tentacles shudders and flops to the ground. I can feel the impact throb through my soles all the way from here. A dust cloud rises from beneath it.

I scan the line of intact buildings nearest me and then slowly, unwillingly, I grin and start to make my way down the slope.

For there, just down the hill and across the road, is the ranger barracks. And there, in the third window from the left, a light shines, and I can see Fumi’s unmistakable shaggy silhouette outlined in it.

* * *

When he opens the door after about five minutes of knocking I push in past him and scan the room. “Roan!” he blurts. “What the fuck are you doing here – “

“Fumi, there’s no time. Are we alone?”

“Well, yeah, but –“ he says, and then he breaks off. He’s glimpsed the cuffs around my wrists and I give him a little sheepish grin. “What’s going on?”

“I should be asking you that,” I tell him. “Why’s the Pit freaking out? And why are you in here and not -”

He blows his breath out, and glowers. “Firstly, Makado’s taken a Tunneler down to get that crystal. Those always piss off the Pit and I guess after 2007 it decided to grow some extra appendages near here that we weren’t aware of and now it’s putting them to good use. And secondly,” he shrugs, “I think they just forgot about me. I’ve had my radio on and I’ve been waiting to respond but I never got a call. Not really complaining.”

I hold up my hands. “Sorry – Tunneler?”

“It’s what they used to make a lot of the bigger tunnels in the Pit. You ever seen those big digging machines they use to dig train tunnels and stuff through solid rock? Think that but bigger and grindier. It’s got vacuums to suck away the dead flesh, cauterizes as it goes, the works. Pisses the Pit off like crazy, though, and now that it’s hungrier these days I guess it got mad enough to pitch a fit about it. They still have two or three of them in a hangar, sitting around from the old Anodyne days just in case they ever need them.”

“Jesus Christ,” I murmur. “And they – Admin or whoever – they _let_ her do that?”

Fumi laughs. “I don’t think Makado is taking orders any more.”

“Fuck her,” I growl. Fumi looks a little taken aback at how bitter I sound. He starts to ask something but I shake my head. “There isn’t time. Help me out of these. Please.”

Fumi mutters a curse under his breath and takes the key. The cuffs fall away from my wrists and clatter on the floor and I am so relieved I don’t know what else to do but hug him. He smells of sweat and cigarette smoke but at the moment I don’t care. His hands flutter, startled, before they close around me and he holds me gently. He pats me on the back after a moment, and I draw away from him. “I’m sorry,” I murmur, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “I was just –“

“I get it,” he says. “Look, why don’t you just get out of here? With all this chaos it’d be easy to –“

“No,” I tell him. “I can’t, I can’t just leave. I have to get back down there.”

“Roan,” he starts. Something about his tone puts pressure on some place in me that’s been bending and bending and finally I snap.

“Fumi,” I say, my voice harsh, “Elena is down there. Maybe she’s already dead, but if she isn’t, she _needs_ me. Nobody else is going down to get her, especially not now.” As if to punctuate my argument, there is another crash from nearby as a tentacle slams into the ground. Fumi nods, explaining that they’ve probably upped the sedative dosage and it’s finally taking effect. His face grows more serious.

“Do you know if she’s still alive down there?”

“No,” I admit. “But if she’s dead I – I have to know. I just have to. Now you can either help me or not, but if you don’t, I’m probably going to end up dead,” I tell him. I marvel at the perfect calmness in my voice. “One way or another, because I’m not experienced enough, because I don’t know the landscape, whatever. But I’m going down there, and that’s final.”

I stand there staring up at him, my hands balled into fists on my hips, and am relieved when his shaggy face breaks open in an unwilling smile. “Alright,” he says after a moment. “But I hope you know a way down, cause there’s no way we can get in through the main orifice now. When the Pit bucked it cracked the plate and wrecked the gantry up here.”

I bite my lip. “Couldn’t we use whatever hole Makado made with the Tunneler?” I ask. Fumi shakes his head.

“No, it’ll be practically vertical. You could maybe rappel down it if you had a whole team to support you but we won’t.”

I utter a mumbled curse. I feel like punching something. If I’ve come all this way and I can’t go back down and get Elena because Makado bored a hole into the Pit and it threw a fit about it –

I stop. Fumi raises his eyebrows. I look over at him and grin. “Fumi, I know how we can get in.”

“Okay, but how - ?”

“There’s no time,” I tell him. I grab his hand and drag him over to the equipment locker in the corner. “Get a suit on and then help me with mine,” I tell him, crouching down to take the boot off. “We’re going to save Elena.”


	4. Chapter 4

“God _damn_ it,” I grunt, tugging again at the padlock. Although the paint on the door is flaking and the hinges are rusty the padlock is shiny and brand new.

“This was the big plan, huh?” Fumi says, and I cast him a venomous look.

“I don’t see you helping,” I point out. He uncrosses his arms briefly to scratch at his chin and then crosses them again, leaning against the chain-link enclosure around the shed.

“What’s in there, anyway?” he asks. “It’s a breathing hole, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I nod. “Peter told me about it. It’s what he was using to – “ I cut myself off, thinking back to Elena’s reaction when I’d told her Makado and Peter had been smuggling people inside the Pit.

“Using to what?”

“Nothing,” I tell him. “It doesn’t matter. Goddam it!” I yell, slamming my fist into the door. I can feel a cold touch of panic start to creep up my throat and I swallow hard, trying to will it back down. “It’s okay,” I say, thinking out loud. “There has to be another way in, there just has to. Fumi, do you know any - ?” I stop. He’s grinning at me, like a cat that caught a canary. “What?”

He points. “You notice anything about that door?”

“What - ?” I turn, look it over once more. “What are you talking about?”

Fumi steps past me, shoves the flat of his utility knife into the exposed hinge and levers it upwards with a quick motion, and then hands me the pin. I stare at it and then back at the door. “You have to be kidding,” I say, grabbing my own knife. Fumi is working on the second one down, laughing quietly to himself.

I smack him lightly on the shoulder and then step beneath him, get down on my knees to fiddle with the bottom hinge. “How long ago did you notice the hinges were on the outside?” I ask.

“As soon as you couldn’t get the padlock open.”

“You bitch,” I laugh. “So you were just sitting there watching me tug on it for five minutes?”

“I wanted to see if you’d figure it out,” he grins. “You have that side?”

I nod and then together we slide the metal door off of its hinges and lay it against the fence behind. The shed is little more than a sheet-metal cage surrounding the orifice, obliquely angled and wetly suppurating, about eight feet high and four feet wide. I grimace. “This is going to suck,” I say. Fumi nods.

“That’s an understatement,” he tells me. “Do you have any idea where this lets out?”

I shake my head. “Peter only told me it lead to somewhere in Bronchial. I don’t know much more than that.” I let out a groan. “Just like I don’t have much of an idea where Elena might be.”

Fumi pats my back lightly. It’s supposed to be a reassuring gesture I guess but it doesn’t make me feel much better. “We’ll find her,” he tells me.

The radio at his belt crackles and belches out a string of static. It makes me jump. There’s a great leaden weight in my stomach and again even though I hate how weak it makes me feel, my hands are trembling. From fear, from anticipation, from…from dread. Dread that I might be too late.

Fumi nudges me. “You ready?” he asks. I nod quickly, swallow hard, and then Fumi is pressing aside the musty flesh of the Pit’s breathing-hole and I, choking down the rising bile, follow him inwards into the twisting folds and venous cavities of the Pit’s lungs.

* * *

“How’d you get out?” I ask him. Fumi grunts, his helmeted head inclining back towards me briefly. I push another alveolar fold out of the way, ducking my head to get beneath the dripping, swinging flap of flesh. The bronchial tissue crinkles beneath my gloved fingers and, not for the first time, a frown of disgust furrows my brow.

I hear a slow breath in my helmeted ears. Fumi had showed me how to link the radios up so we wouldn’t have to yell at each other to be heard over the Pit’s gusting, noxious breaths, but one of the downsides is that it’s a hot mic – you can’t turn it off or you have to redo it each time. Fumi had already gotten into a habit of chuckling at me whenever I let out an unwilling little grunt of disgust every time I stepped in a particularly gloppy bronchial puddle and it made me want to smack him, but so far I was managing to keep my temper in check.

Part of me wants to rush, wants to blast through the tangled and twisting passages of Bronchial like a heat-seeking missile and rip and tear my way down to wherever the hell Elena is and carry her out of here come hell or high water, but a cooler, more rational part of me also knows that this isn’t something that can be rushed, not without us getting hurt as well. If I was moving any more quickly there’ve been at least a dozen places we’ve passed so far where I _know_ I would have fallen, maybe twisted an ankle or – god – hurt my poor broken leg even further. Whatever magic the autodoc was capable of, I don’t think it figured I would be putting in this much use so quickly, and even though I try to treat it gently there is a dull, foreboding bone-deep ache settled heavily into the middle of the bone that makes me worried, makes me wonder how much time I have before I hurt it really seriously.

“I was hoping you’d forgotten about that,” Fumi tells me, and I blink.

“What –“ I start, but he’s already sighed and moved onwards. I rush up to follow him, find him pondering a narrow y-passage.

“I think it’s this way,” he says, pointing to the leftmost one, and before I can ask him if he’s sure or if we’d better check both just in case, he pushes ahead into it leaving me to follow, shaking my head. “I’m not proud of running,” he says. “Back when those two psychos shot the Sergeant. I was almost hoping you’d forgotten that I had.”

I hadn’t forgotten but I also hadn’t really cared. I was almost glad that Fumi had gotten away when he had. Erica and Marcus – I’m not sure whether or not they had even noticed him. “I don’t want you to feel guilty,” I tell him, “because you shouldn’t. They would have shot you just like they shot the Sergeant or Elena.”

“They _shot_ Elena?” he asks, incredulous, and I nod, briefly recounting what happened. He lets out a muffled curse and shakes his head. “Roan, kid…you know there’s a decent chance she’s already dead, right? Even if the bullet missed anything too vital it’s not a good environment down here to have a hole in you. There are some seriously nasty bacteria and -”

“Yeah,” I snap. “I’m aware of that. And don’t call me kid.”

A frosty silence settles over us

“Sorry,” he says after a moment.

“It’s okay,” I breathe, although I’m saying mostly to try and convince myself. “I just – she can’t be dead, okay? She just _can’t_ be.”

The Pit moans again and as before the flesh around us contracts rhythmically. Fumi and I both stop, forced to wait it out.

“I’m not trying to judge,” Fumi says, “but you’ve only known her for what, a week? Tops? Is the tail really that good?”

“Oh, fuck off,” I tell him, not even bothering to hide the serration in my voice. “You know, I heard what you said on the radio that day. Back before the briefing.”

“Refresh my memory.”

“You called Elena on the radio, asking where the new girl from Admin with the tight little ass was, you couldn’t find her to tell her to get to the briefing. I think you mentioned something about how you wouldn’t mind getting her alone and –“

So I embellished a little. He was squirming and I felt like being vindictive.

“I’m not proud I said that,” Fumi says, cutting me off, and there is a softness to his voice that makes me stop. The moan croaks out to a halt and with a shudder the flesh around us draws back and opens up. He turns and looks at me; the helmet pushes his cheeks together, makes him look like a dwarf, all ruddy cheeks and thick black beard. “If it’s any defense, I didn’t know you were listening. You were with Elena?”

“Yeah.”

“Even back then?”

“She was showing me the little graveyard,” I tell him. Unwillingly my lips quirk up into a smile. “I think I would have kissed her then if you hadn’t interrupted.”

Fumi laughs. “That’s rich,” he says. “You kiss people in a graveyard?”

I roll my eyes at him, push him forward. “Well, because of you I had to wait until the party. I don’t think either of us worked our nerve up again until then.”

“I knew she was into you,” Fumi mentions, starting off again. “That’s the reason I said that in the first place, cause I was trying to tease her. I just didn’t know you’d, you know, literally be right there.”

“You knew? What, did she tell you?”

“You couldn’t _tell_ she was into you until the party?” he asks, equally quizzical, and I feel myself blush, let that one go unanswered.

We walk onwards in silence. Well, relative silence; Bronchial is a rhythmic forest of noise, a low dull rush of wind grinding at the back of my ears even through the helmet. I’d noticed back in the shed that they roof was made of something like chicken wire but even so it was bowed inward severely. I’d initially figured it to just be the weight of the wire itself pulling downwards but now I think it was the suction of the Pit breathing in.

Ten more steps. Fumi and I start to talk at the same time, and then I laugh and tell him to go while he tries to be gallant and tells me to go. I hope he doesn’t think I hate him.

“How _did_ you get out?” I ask him, and he waves his hand.

“Right. The Cord isn’t the only way up, just the fastest. I circled back around, took a couple of elevators, and then high-tailed it all the way up. You can make it in about a day, if you hustle. I grabbed Makado as soon as I got up and told her what had happened and she locked everything down, sent me to the barracks for ‘rest.’ I think she was just worried I’d tell everybody what I’d seen. Then…I don’t know. I guess she went down herself, hot-rodded an IAV all the way down to the place you were. The fungal zone? We’re not supposed to go down there normally, it’s…ecologically unstable.”

“It was horrible,” I murmur, thinking of Peter. Thinking, unwillingly, of Klaus.

It was a familiar feeling, that rush of panic and then of calm, of everything clicking together and smoothing out, once I’d shot him. I had stood over him, the gun clutched loosely in my hand, still trained on him even though it was empty and the slide had locked back once I’d shot that last magic bullet, one in the chamber, Marcus’s parting gift to me from beyond the grave. I had stared at Klaus until he had lain still for quite a while and then I had knelt down next to him and grabbed the magazine from the floor, slotted it back into the pistol and released the slide, and then I went outside and had a good cry.

It makes sense, in hindsight, him being an informant rather than an actual FBI man. That stupid shit, ejecting the magazine while I’m still holding the gun on him? It’s a miracle I didn’t shoot him right then, it’s a miracle I was still frozen up, reliving –

Fumi nudges me and I realize I’ve zoned out while he was asking me something. “Why do you like Elena? Really,” he repeats. “I’m curious.”

I give him a little grunt to indicate that I’m thinking about it. “She’s kind to me,” I say finally. “She knew I wouldn’t be able to cut it down there from the very start. She tried so hard to keep me out of the Pit and then once I was in she took care of me the whole way. She has a…a very strong sense of right and wrong. She doesn’t compromise for anything.”

I glance over at Fumi. The passage has widened enough at this point that we can walk side by side. He stays silent. He wants me to keep going, of course, but I don’t see any harm in it so I oblige him. “She was the first girl I had sex with,” I tell him, studying his reaction closely. He looks over at me, holds my gaze for a moment, and then looks away.

“Really?” he asks.

“Yeah. The night of the party.”

“First love,” he says. I laugh.

“A new experience, maybe,” I concede.

“Is it much different?”

“Hmm?”

“From being with a man. Is it different?”

I think about it. “Very,” I tell him. He nods.

“I mean,” he grins, “you’d think it would be, but _I_ would never know…”

I elbow him lightly and then dodge the one he throws back at me. We walk on for a while further.

“You know,” Fumi starts, and then stops.

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Oh, shut up,” I growl at him. “What is it?”

“No,” he says, pushing a fold of flesh out of the way. “It really is nothing, I was going to say something but I thought better of it.”

“Just tell me.”

He looks back at me for a moment, then shrugs. “I was going to say,” he says slowly, “that in all honesty Elena and I are not on the best of terms.”

“Oh?”

“A little while before you showed up, I had to turn her down. She didn’t take it very well. Made some…colorful comments about my heritage. Which were completely untrue, I might add.”

“Turn her do – oh,” I finish. I can feel my cheeks color beneath my helmet.

“You can see why I might have thought better of telling you something like that.”

“Well, it doesn’t bother me,” I say firmly. “That’s the past and whatever decisions she made were ones she made then, not now.”

“Do you really believe that?” he asks. “I mean, really – I’m just curious. I’m not trying to make you doubt yourself if that really is true.”

“Aren’t you angry at her?” I say, sidestepping the question. “I mean, if she came on to you and then acted like a bitch about it afterwards…”

“What I’m trying to say is, that was a particularly Elena thing to do.”

I think about that for a moment and then I find myself smiling. “Fumi…are you trying to tell me Elena is a slut?”

“That’s such a harsh word,” he says. “But…yes.”

“Are you afraid I’m going to get hurt? How big brother of you.”

“Please. I just think it’s something you ought to know about. Besides, if you’re as involved as you say you are with her, I’m sure she told you herself.”

That does make me stop. “She didn’t actually,” I say. Fumi raises an eyebrow. I can just barely see it beneath the glass pane of the helmet. “She told me that there was sex, occasionally. You know, between team members, but never any sort of emotional attachment. It would, I don’t know, disrupt the group dynamic or whatever.”

“Mm,” he grunts. “That’s maybe the idealized version of it, I guess. All I can tell you is that her and Slate were pretty hot and heavy for a while but they broke it off, I don’t know, maybe a month or two ago.”

I think about that, roll it around in my mouth. I don’t much like the taste. Slate had grown on me over the short time I’d known him but not that much. I think about him and Elena, about her flashing that dazzling smile at him, about him grinning that sly, knowing, fox’s grin at her, about his hands encircling her waist, cupping her lithe, muscular ass, and I feel a little spark of jealousy flare up in my stomach. Then I take a breath, deliberately, and let it out.

The night that Slate died Elena and I had held each other tightly in our tent and she had come close to crying but hadn’t. I’d told her it was okay and that if she needed to talk about it she could, but she had just shaken her head. There was grief in her eyes but it was low and cool and detached. We had held each other and I had traced my fingers up and down her naked body but we hadn’t made love. It had been too serious for that. I wanted her to know that I cared about her, that she had more meaning to me to me than just as a series of orifices. In the morning she had kissed me awake and had smiled so brightly that for a moment I’d thought the sun was rising, right there in the belly of the Pit, and it had all been okay.

“What are you smiling about?” Fumi asks, and I laugh. I almost trip on a tumorous, fleshy nodule growing out of the floor and he catches me, puts me back upright again.

“I was thinking about Elena,” I tell him, and he shakes his head, grin sprouting amid his forest of a beard.

“I could have told you literally anything about her and you’d still be head over heels for her, huh?”

“Yeah,” I admit. “The last relationship I was in wasn’t the best.” I shrug. “I only stayed in it for as long as I did because I – because I made some bad decisions and I figured that everything I touched turned to shit. Thor – my ex-boyfriend – he didn’t. So I clung to it way, way longer than I should have.”

“His name was _Thor_?”

“It was a nickname. His real name was Richard.”

Fumi nods. A little more silence passes, and then he nudges me.

“At least you have some self-awareness about it,” he says.

“Oh, I didn’t for a long time. But I had a lot of time to do some soul-searching recently,” I say, formalizing masses of incoherent thoughts that have been bunching behind my eyes for at least the past two days, if not longer. “And I decided I wasn’t going to fuck this one up, if I could help it. I don’t care if she’s been wild, I don’t care if she’s a slut, she’s been kind to me. That’s what matters.”

Do I mean that? Is that what my soul thinks? Am I just trying to make myself feel better after discovering the Elena isn’t a saint? I think back to that first night that I kissed her, drunk and urgent on the steps of the barracks, the crickets playing symphony and the fireflies fluttering in a spangled backdrop. I think back to the way the hair on the back of my neck had stood up, to the tingling feeling in my stomach when her hand had knitted into my hair and held me closer to her.

The Pit’s lungs are interminable. Way after winding way, passage after passage. It’s only been about a half hour or so but it feels like ages. Fumi is of the opinion that we ought to head down to the Control Center and raid their armory, get some real firepower. Between the two of us we have two little .45-caliber pistols, that’s all, and even then we wouldn’t have them if Fumi hadn’t known where Crookshank had kept them stashed.

I’d accepted mine with hesitation but I knew it would have been the height of stupidity to go down here without being armed. My skin had crawled and I had felt a little like throwing up as I’d taken it from him, as the reliable weight of the pistol settled into my palm, and then I had slipped it into my holster and after a while I was able to forget that I was wearing it, that it was hanging off of my side ready to use.

But a .45 won’t do a lot to some of the things down here. That’s his argument, that he keeps repeating, while I, with mounting frustration, point out to him that the longer we wait, the more danger Elena almost certainly is in. I want to head straight down to the terminus of the Cord and look around for her. We bicker about it for a while until I, with some surprise, take a step around another alveolar fold and find my cleated boots clanking on metal grating. I let out a whoop and charge forward, pushing through another tight sphincter-like gap, and then I burst out into a long hallway, the same one Peter described to me – Jesus, just a few days ago. Or has it been a week already? I’m not sure. I don’t know what day it is, how long this misadventure has been perpetuated for. I turn back around and grin at Fumi, open my mouth to say something stupid, and then something bowls into me, sends me pitching forward. I catch myself but only just, and then something chitinous and hissing and many-legged is crawling over me and wave of white-hot revulsion floods into my stomach.

I reach back and batter at it but just from the angle I can’t do anything to it. It fixes its jaws to my shoulder, cutting through the suit like paper and I cry out in pain. I scrabble for my holster but succeed only in knocking the gun from it, sending it clattering across the metal floor. Fumi rushes forward, crying out my name, but the thing on top of me tugs hard at my shoulder and starts to drag me off. I manage to roll over onto my back and see something like an enormous louse, just inches away from my face, faceted eyes staring into mine. Its enormous mouthparts are coated in blood and my stomach flips as I realize it’s mine, leaking from my shoulder.

“Roan!” Fumi cries. He has his pistol out but he can’t get a bead on it, it’s too close to me.

“Help me!” I call out as the insect pulls me backwards another few feet. I’m too heavy for it to really manage, it’s not quite as much of a monster as an abyssal copepod is, but it feels as though it’s going to bite my arm off at the shoulder, and although I flail at it it just _won’t let go –_

I draw back and with all of my strength smash it in the face with one gloved fist, and to my shock it hisses and drops me. Immediately I roll out of the way, letting out a screech of pain when my shoulder makes contact with the ground and the jarring of it sends white-hot knives scurrying up my nerves, and then there is a thunderclap nearby and something thumps into the insect. The thunder roars two, three, four more times, and then Fumi is rushing to me and helping me up while my ears ring and the insect shudders quietly to itself as it dies, its head blown apart like a rotten pumpkin.

I sit there in silence as the ringing fades and Fumi washes the cut out with disinfectant, bandages my shoulder, applies an analgesic spray to it, patches me up. The cut apparently is deep but clean and didn’t, as far as he can tell from my range of motion, cause me any permanent damage. I sit there and shudder as the adrenaline gradually leaves my system, and then when he’s done he sighs heavily and sits down next to me.

“You doing okay?” he asks, me, and I nod slowly.

“What was that thing?”

“Just a lesser copepod.”

“ _Just_?”

“Yeah,” he shrugs. “Not an especially big one. Like the abyssal’s smaller, dumber, higher-depth counterpart. Minus the hands.”

I bury my head in my hands. There is a thick knot of worry in my stomach and I don’t know if I can untangle it alone. Fumi clearly doesn’t know what to do about me. “Roan, are you okay?” he keeps asking. He rests his hand gently on my shoulderblade and it makes me want to cry and laugh at the same time.

“How could she still be alive?” I say. It comes out almost like a sob. “If there’s shit like _this_ up here where everything’s – where everything’s mostly harmless, how could she be alive? Something will have gotten her by now, something will have –“

“Roan.”

“Oh god,” I say. “She’s _dead_ because of me, because I was stupid enough to think that she wouldn’t try and attack Erica, she’s dead because –“

“Snap out of it!” Fumi barks at me.

I give him a bleak look. “We should just go back.”

“Roan,” he says, “would Elena give up on you?”

I open my mouth, and then I shut it. Fumi raises his eyebrows at me.

And so with nothing left to say I shake my head, not trusting myself to speak, and then we get up and head off down the hallway, following the signs marked Control Center.

* * *

I check my pilfered wristwatch again and shift anxiously from foot to foot. Fumi’s been inside the control room for five minutes already. I can’t hear anything over all of the claxons blaring, here outside in the fat little corridor leading up to it, up two flights of stairs and behind another one of those horrible submarine doors. Worry’s gnawing at me, somewhere deep down in the pit of my stomach; what if they know Fumi and I are in cahoots? What if something’s wrong in there, what if he ran into Makado, or the FBI, or…

I bite my lip hard. Around me the Pit quakes again and rattles the little metal pod of the Control Center like someone shaking a tin of mints. I feel like an Altoid. It’s incredible how much less safe I feel inside here, with the high-tech stabilizing arms straining hard against the Pit’s gullet. I’d rather ride this out in Bronchial any day; Bronchial was _comforting_ , even, because whenever the Pit moaned and grunted and flexed, all of the little flaps and craggy little polyps and bulbs and what the hell ever else all flopped over and covered us like a fullbody hug and just held us there, gently, almost, like the Pit was telling us that it would be okay.

I shake my head. “I have got to get out of here,” I mutter, and then I reach over and open the door and stride in and immediately find myself in the middle of a sea of chaos.

There are a couple more nerds here than before and they’re all up to their eyeballs in flashing lights and alarms, each of them on the phone or muttering into a headset or clustered around a fancy-looking holographic unit that displays a three-dimensional image of something that looks like a fat, squat beetroot that I assume is a model of the Pit. Fumi is talking to one of the nerds, rather urgently, his helmet unclasped and hanging at his side, his fingers hooked under the rear lip of it. He glances over when the door opens and sees me and his expression darkens. He’d told me to stay outside; I had given him a rundown of what Makado had done on the way up, through Bronchial and then into the main gullet of the Pit, and he’d said it would be safer if he went in alone and did the talking, after all, at least four of the nerds had seen me with Makado, they surely would have known what I was supposed to be going down for, but I had gotten so worried –

Nobody’s paying any attention to me. Scarcely anybody even bothered to look up when the door opened, and of those that did they met my tight, anxious face with blank stares and unfamiliar visages. I slip inside, duck behind a nerd rushing past with a stack of papers under his arm and slip over to Fumi. The man he was talking to has given him a shake of the head, with finality, and moved away into a back room that I know is a briefing or conference room. The last time I saw it it had takeout containers all over the place; I wonder if they’ve done any cleaning up since.

“Why’d you come in,” he hisses, leaning close to me so we can confer. I shrug.

“Got worried. Did you get the guns?”

“That fuck,” he says, jerking his head back at the conference room, “is in charge and he won’t unlock the armory for me. Wants Makado’s permission, which I’m obviously not liable to get, even if we could reach her.”

“Goddam it,” I mutter. “Look, why don’t we bust in there and just, I don’t know, take the keys?”

There’s another lurch from the Pit and I reach out, grab Fumi’s shoulder to steady myself. “What, you want to just mug the guy?” he asks.

“We are _not_ coming all this way and not getting any of the hardware out of it,” I hiss. “Elena is _dying_ –“

“Yes,” he barks, and then quiets himself. “Yes,” he says, “I’m aware of our time crunch. But if we do something like that, we’re going to get someone on our ass, and I’d rather worry about the wildlife instead of people. You’re already risking everything by coming in here –“

“Fuck this,” I mutter, and then I cast a wary glance around and slip into the conference room, dodging Fumi as I do.

Inside the conference room I find, amid a nest of takeout boxes, the tall, gaunt man Fumi was talking to, speaking in a hushed tone down the throat of a bright red telephone. He glances up as I shut the door behind myself and does a double-take. “Get out,” he tells me, pointing at the door. “You aren’t allowed in there, I already told your friend that I’d need – wait a minute,” he says. There’s a flutter of butterflies in my stomach while I wait for him to recognize me, and when I does I am momentarily shocked that pales. He slams the phone down into its cradle and points a finger at me. “You had better stay right there,” he warns me. “I know exactly who you are. I’m going to call the surface right now and get them to send a team right down to get you back into custody. You’ve got some nerve –“

“Look,” I tell him. “Just give us the keys to the armory and we’ll be out of your hair. That’s all we want. We’re trying to help,” I say, and as if to punctuate my argument, the Pit groans again.

“Stay right there,” he repeats, and picks up the phone again. I whip the pistol out of my holster and train it on him.

There’s a sensation in my stomach like I’m falling, like I’ve just taken a wrong step right off a cliff, the same lurch you get when you miss a step in the middle of the night and your brain didn’t think it was there, that same sensation of gutless horror like you’ll fall forever and stop suddenly. The man is staring at me; his eyes are very wide.

“Give me the keys,” I tell him. “I’m not going to ask again,” I say, thinking maybe it’ll sound threatening if by some chance my voice happens not to shake while I’m spitting my one-liners.

A part of my brain is screaming at me that I haven’t thought this through, what am I going to do with this guy once I’ve gotten the keys from him, what am I going to do if he calls my bluff, what am I going to do if –

The keys plonk down on the table and slide over to me. Before I can think I reach out and take them, ball them tightly in my fist. I give the man a look and open my mouth to say something but before I can there is another roar from outside and the ground pitches to the left and knocks us both off our feet. There are yells of surprise and horror from outside in the main room and a new alarm is blaring now, one with a much more urgent tone than any of the others. The gun’s clattered to the floor as well and both I and the gaunt man know it. It’s landed just between us, sprawled in a stack of upended file cabinets, just there on the floor. The red emergency lights gleam off its sleek metal lines and make it look like it’s been drenched in blood.

We dive for it at the same time, and he puts his hand in my face and shoves me away, but not before I can fit a hand around the barrel of the gun. I can’t think, my brain has been replaced with something animal, something screaming in terror, but I can feel my lips draw back in a snarl, and even as he arches his fingers inwards to claw at my eyes, the fist I made earlier snaps outwards like it has a mind of its own and slams with all of the might I can muster square into his face and I feel his nose give beneath my balled fingers, and he shrieks and claps his hands to his face. I grab the gun and train it on him again, a little unnecessarily, getting unsteadily to my feet as the control center, clearly at a very cockeyed angle, slips a few feet further down and nearly knocks me over again.

Fumi bursts in but because of the angle the door slams on his face right after he’s pushed it open. “Roan!” he cries. Through the open door I can hear complete pandemonium outside, but through the alarms and cries and panic I hear something that punches my heart straight up into my mouth, makes time slow down to a trickle, running through my agonized brain to give me more perceived seconds to dwell on the horror: I hear the sound of buckling, groaning metal, and then a loud snapping screech as it finally starts to give.


	5. Chapter 5

Fumi hauls me to my feet and I cry out as I put my leg wrong. He glares back at me as I cling onto him. The boot’s come loose and I kneel down quickly and tug at the straps.

“Goddam it!” he cries. “We have to _go,_ ” he tells me, tugging again at my shoulder, and I bat at him.

“Give me a fucking second!”

“We don’t _have_ a second!”

The metal groans again and there are more screams from outside in the main control room. The man I’ve clobbered is trying to get to his feet but he seems terribly dazed. There’s blood all down his front from where I’ve hit him and his nose is crooked now. He glares at me with watery eyes full of fear.

“You broke my _nose_ ,” he moans. I ignore him, ignore the pang of guilt and fear wealing my stomach, force my hands to _stop shaking_ and grab the tabs of the Velcro straps and pull them tight. Snap, snap. There. I wiggle my foot experimentally before Fumi yanks at me again and tugs me out into the control room.

“Watch it!” I tell him, but he shakes his head brusquely. His eyes are very dark. “Wait,” I say, glancing backwards. “The guy…”

The ceiling of the control room is crunched inwards like an enormous tooth has dug against it. There’s a tear in the metal and past the sparking wires and torn, serrated edges, I can see the wet, glistening throat of the Pit staring back at me.

Everyone has rushed outside, left the door hanging open. I can hear yells and cries from the stairs leading back the way we came. There’s the sound of movement in the conference room and then the man I punched comes rushing out and sprints past us, heading for the door. He slams into it and then flings it open and vanishes downwards, rushing like the devil were chasing him.

“Do you have the key?” Fumi asks me, and I shut my mouth and nod.

“Yes, right here.”

He tugs me away from the control room and down the staircase on the other side. We go down three flights, Fumi waiting impatiently at each landing, glaring back up at me as I hobble down as quickly as I can, and then we come to a door marked ‘Armory’ that my key fits into. Fumi pushes past me roughly and I smack him.

“What the fuck is your problem –“ I start, but Fumi rounds on me. Although he isn’t tall he’s still taller than I am and when he puts his finger in my face I feel a little tremble of fear rumble somewhere deep down inside me. I can’t piss him off, I can’t ruin this, I can’t _do_ this on my own…

“Merriweather,” he says, and my mouth drops open. I never told him, I realize, I never told him I wasn’t from Admin, he doesn’t _know…_

“I’m warning you,” he continues, “the only reason I agreed to do this was because nobody else was going to go down and get Elena out, and no matter what my personal opinion of her is, I’m not about to leave her behind down there. I don’t know who you are or where you came from or what the hell they were teaching you in Admin, but if you’re going to pretend to be a fucking commando down here and deck people whenever the hell you feel like it you’re going to be walking home, because I am not about to get any more people hurt because of a goddam loose cannon like you.”

While he was chewing me out my emotions had shifted from shame and embarrassment to something approaching rage. I clench my fist hard enough that I can feel my nails dig into the soft part of my palm. “Fumi,” I hiss, “how the _fuck_ did you want to get that key? You asking politely didn’t work. Makado wouldn’t give you permission, especially if she knew you were with me. What were we supposed to do?”

“Did you ever think I don’t want to be in trouble?” he snarls, shoving a bulky shotgun into my hands. “Did you ever think that maybe I was putting my own neck on the line getting you out of those cuffs? And now if they think I’m helping a fucking criminal escape from FBI custody -” I pull the pump back and peer into the chamber and then notice that he’s giving me an appraising frown.

“What?” I ask. “I’m listening.”

“How come you know so much about guns?” he asks me, and I roll my eyes.

“What, just because I’m a girl means I can’t know anything about firearms?”

“I saw your qualifications at the pistol range,” he tells me. “You were shit, you couldn’t hit a damn thing.”

“I’m not good with pistols,” I tell him primly. “Pass the .45 ammo, please.”

Before I can grab it from him there’s another groan of metal and the Control Center lurches below us. I fall against a rack of slug rifles and the little .45 cartridges rain down on me like marbles. “Ow, fuck.”

“Sorry,” he says, grabbing another box and tossing it to me.

“Did you see any magazines? I’ve only got two,” I say, patting my belt.

“Just grab all the shit you can carry and scram,” he tells me. “We’ve only got so much time before –“

I don’t get to hear the end of the sentence. There is another sickening lurch and then my stomach drifts up into my throat. We’re in freefall. I have just enough time to throw myself over to Fumi and grab onto the equipment rack behind him before the metal puck of the Control Center lands hard enough to force the breath out of me, to force a scream from between my lips, to force the light out of my eyes.

* * *

I wake quickly, or at least it seems like I do. I push myself up off of Fumi and glare around at the inside of the armory, pitch black now that the lights have gone out, even the red emergency lights, flickering ominously in the dingy stairwell before. I open my mouth, lick my lips.

“Fumi?” I whisper.

We seem to have come to a stop at this point. I recall a sensation of sliding or slipping, like my insides were moving and sort of dragging the rest of me along behind them, but now it’s stopped. I feel a little scared to stand up and start moving around, like if I do I’ll untip some sort of delicate balance the Control Center has struck with whatever it’s resting on and send it careening off into the abyss. What’s even below here, anyway? What have we landed on? I guess I sort of assumed the Pit’s gullet was an analogue for a throat and that if you go down far enough there’s some kind of stomach or something, but if that’s true then what the hell have we landed on…

Fumi grunts next to me and I reach down and after some fumbling unclip the flashlight from my belt and click it on.”Fumi,” I whisper again. “Fumi, wake up.”

“Fuck,” he groans, sitting up slowly, and I feel the relief pour into me.

“Oh, thank god,” I murmur. I feel a sudden urge to hug him but stuff it back down. “Are you okay?” I ask instead. “We landed pretty hard, but I’m not sure what on…”

“I don’t know either,” he says. “Maybe the wreck of the old Lower Visitor Center, bits of it are still lodged deeper in the gullet, it’s possible the Control Center could have landed on top of it, but I don’t know if that might knock the LVC loose itself.”

I get to my feet. It seems like we’ve leveled out again, one way or another, but the feeling makes me uneasy now, like we might slip off of whatever ledge we’re resting on. “Well, we seem stable enough,” I say, hoping that by saying it it’ll make it true. “How can we get out of here?”

Fumi sighs heavily, taking my proffered hand. The man is heavy in his suit – hell, he’d be heavy without the suit – but I manage to get him to his feet and he nods to the door.

I follow Fumi wordlessly down the stairs, the few utility pockets on my suit filled with pistol rounds and a couple of spare magazines I managed to grab. I’ll load them later, we’ll have time later. Right now just being in this – in this tomb is making me feel antsy.

“I hope everyone got out,” I murmur. Fumi snorts.

“What do you care?” he asks. My mouth drops open in shock but I bite back the angry reply rising to my lips.

“Look,” I tell him as he motions me forward to help him with a particularly recalcitrant door, “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t break _my_ nose,” he points out, and I roll my eyes. I yank again at the door but it refuses to budge.

“I’m not apologizing for that,” I tell him. “I’m apologizing for dragging you into this.”

Fumi leans up against the door, inclines his head my way. His eyes are dark but less so than before, I think. “I could make excuses,” I continue, gesturing. “I could tell you that I didn’t have any place left to go, I didn’t know what else to do, that I was terrified that I’d lose Elena…shit, that I still _am_ terrified that I _will_ lose Elena. I told you that Makado was setting me up but there’s a lot that you still don’t know, and I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you everything back up on the surface before letting you decide if you wanted to help me out on my damn-fool errand down here. I was scared and I made a stupid decision and I’m sorry. If you want to leave me down here I won’t blame you. I don’t know if I have time to help you get back to the surface but I’ll –“

“I’m not going anywhere,” he tells me. “And you don’t have to be sorry. I got angry back there because I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, that’s all. I’m glad we got the armory key. Now let’s just keep moving.”

I can sense that there’s more lurking beneath the surface but I don’t press it. After five minutes or so of strenuous pulling we finally unstick the door and stumble outside onto a torn gantry leading to nowhere and there just below is the stained and pitted remains of the Lower Visitor Center, dented and scraped and masticated but still mostly intact, lodged sideways in the Pit’s throat. Fumi gives me a significant glance.

“I think we just found our way out of here,” he says, pointing to a shattered window up ahead. Something about it makes me shudder, the fact that it’s still _here_ , the fact that even though all this happened four years ago nothing’s been done to clean it up, nothing’s _changed_ , it’s just lodged here slowly slipping down and down and down…

Fumi helps me through the window, carefully and slowly so that I don’t catch my suit and tear it on any of the jagged edges of the reinforced glass still lodged in the windowframe. It’s a short drop and I take it hard, but only because I try to land on my good left leg, keeping the right tucked up beneath me. I wobble but don’t fall. There’s all kinds of crap on the floor – dirt, debris, glass, cracked tiles, papers, everything. I don’t have time to take a good look around before I turn back around and help Fumi through the window as well, and then once we’ve inspected each other’s suits for tears I finally get a chance to inspect the scenery, my horribly inadequate flashlight playing over the surfaces of the ruined concourse, giving me tiny snapshots of long-faded glory days. I see posters showing smiling people eating and shopping, I see rows and rows of merchandise still in shelves, flipped over and disheveled but perfectly good. Everything is stained and dirty and covered in what I think is rust but upon closer inspection is a kind of filmy dried ichor.

I look out over the balcony which I can see now opens over a yawning hole in the floor, the ropy flesh of the Pit’s gullet clenching together beneath it, pale and sluglike and sickening, and try to imagine what it must have looked like back in its heyday.

“This must really have been something,” I murmur, glancing over at Fumi. Even he looks a little awed at our surroundings. “Did you ever come here while it was still up and running?”

“When I was a kid,” he says. “I only joined after the disaster. 2008, to be specific.”

I offer a grunted acknowledgement but I’m too busy gawking to give him anything more substantial than that.

A horrible thought occurs to me as I edge a little closer to the bannister, lean out over it and glare down at the murky darkness below, swallowing up the light like it were hungry for it. “Fumi, are we…trapped in here now?”

He shrugs. “Probably not. I mean, it was easy enough to get in, wasn’t it? If we felt like it we could go right back out again the same way and walk around up on the roof of this place for a while and see if there was somewhere we could climb to.”

“But there isn’t, I don’t know, a passageway that leads down here? Something they put in after 2007?”

“No, there’s nothing like that. They haven’t done any major construction in the Pit after the disaster. Probably the biggest thing of that nature that’s been done is what Makado did with that Tunneler earlier today.”

I shudder to think about it. “Seemed like the Pit didn’t like it very much.”

Fumi shrugs. “Those are the things they used back in the day. If it pitched this much of a fit every time they used them I think they probably wouldn’t have gotten so much done with them. Maybe Makado’s right and the Pit is starting to wake up. She did say back in Oyster’s shame that that’s what the science department thought, anyway.”

“I just didn’t know that the Pit could _move_ ,” I say. “I didn’t know it had fucking tentacles.”

“They came out in 2007,” Fumi starts, leaning on the bannister next to me. It groans under the extra weight and we both back away hurriedly and look for someplace a little safer to rest. “They came out in 2007. Miles away in some places, just giant masses of flesh bursting out of the ground. Nowhere civilized, thank goodness.”

“I’d _never_ heard of that,” I murmur. “I wonder if they were trying to hush it up.”

“I don’t know,” Fumi shrugs. “Maybe. In Ranger training they show you videos of some of them, sort of like a ‘this-is-why-this-is-so-important’ type thing. They had this CGI mockup of Lubbock and showed the devastation if a tentacle like that were to sprout up there and go nuts.”

“It reaches as far as Lubbock?”

“I don’t think so,” Fumi says. “But who knows. Maybe if you go deep enough down…”

The thought makes me shudder. We sit there for another five minutes or so, breathing the musty Pit air flowing through the ruined Visitor Center and imagining what might be lurking further in waiting for us. Anything nasty hiding down there in the dark? Possibly. I ask Fumi about it but he just shrugs. He was never much of a biologist, he says, but he thinks there probably isn’t enough to eat, not enough food. Little stuff, maybe, but nothing big, nothing like the copepod we met on the way in.

It reassures me a little. Not a ton, but a little. I get up; Fumi rises and offers to help me but I wave him away. If I can’t at least stand up by myself, even with the boot on, I shouldn’t be down here.

“We need a plan,” I tell him, and Fumi nods.

Together, over about fifteen minutes or so, we go through a list of abandoned ranger stations and listening posts Elena could have reached from the bottom of the Cord near Oyster’s Shame. Some Fumi dismisses as being in too dangerous territory for Elena to have risked it, others Fumi suggests would have medical supplies or are too derelict to be attractive. We go through this on the little map on his wristpad, huddled together, sweat pouring down my back in the hot suit. I could snap the helmet down and have the climate control start up automatically but I don’t want to waste the battery. Something is niggling at me as Fumi runs down the list of stations, eliminating one or two more but leaving them sidelined as possibilities, to potentially check after we’ve gone through everywhere else. I bite my lip and then reluctantly force myself to ask:

“Fumi, it’s been almost two days now since I saw her. Are any of these stations going to have medical supplies that would help her deal with a hole through her abdomen for that long?”

Fumi is silent for a long while and then, finally, he shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I don’t think so, no.”

It’s what a horrible little part of me expected to hear, I guess, but it doesn’t stop the bottom of my stomach falling out when he says it. “God _damn_ it,” I mutter.

“It doesn’t mean she’s dead,” Fumi says, quickly. “She could have –“

“What do you need to treat a gunshot wound like that, Fumi?” I ask, gesticulating. “You need sutures, you need to poke around in there and make sure little parts of the bullet aren’t left inside, you need actual surgery. Maybe some gauze and painkillers and adrenaline would keep her going for a while but for this long? If she isn’t dead then she has an infection that’s going to kill her in –“

“Roan, stop.”

I wipe at my eyes, furious with myself for crying, furious for letting her –

“ _Stop_.”

“I’ve dragged you into this too,” I murmur, glaring at him. “I just ruin – I ruin everything I touch, everything just turns to _shit_ , it’s like I can’t –“

“You’re spiraling right now. You know that, right?”

“I’m not spiraling.”

Fumi crosses his arms. Behind him the shattered glass of a storefront shows a poster of a plush…thing, looking like a frilly folded stingray, with a long proboscis. “’Mini Daves,’ 50% off,” the poster reads. I frown at it and then tear my eyes away, drag them back to Fumi. I’m not getting distracted, I want to be mad, I _want_ to be furious, at myself, at Fumi, at Elena and Erica and Makado, at _something_. Fumi sees the look in my eyes and puts his hands up in a placating gesture. “I want to fucking punch something,” I tell him, very seriously, and he at least has the good grace not to laugh at me and my little noodly arms punching something. Although, to be fair, I did just break a man’s nose maybe about twenty minutes ago, so there’s that. I knew all that bullshit with dumbbells was going to pay off sometime.

I can still feel his nose breaking beneath my fist, can still feel the imprint of it, can still feel the bone-deep ache of it. Punching someone isn’t like in the movies, it _hurts_. Stand a cinderblock up on a tree stump and punch it. Hitting someone in the face is easier on your knuckles but just as hard on your joints and bones. The skull is _solid_.

“What am I going to do if she’s dead?” I ask Fumi.

“Roan,” he says, putting his arm around me with a slow gesture like he’s afraid I might hiss at him like a cat and scratch his eyes out, “even _if_ she’s dead we can still get her body. We can show her the respect she deserves. That at the very least is worth going on for.”

I swallow hard and then reluctantly lean into him. It feels nice, having an arm around me and a warm body nearby. I take a deep breath and then let it out again. “Okay,” I murmur. Ahead of us, in a little free-standing pylon, is a poster advertising the ballast bulbs. “Healing waters!” it says. “Adult fun!” it proclaims. I look at the wide grins of the people in the photos, notice how a couple of them are twisted lasciviously, how in one of the photos, one of the women’s bikini tops is a little askew, at how the man standing next to her very clearly has his hand on her ass and squeezing tightly. I –

My mouth drops open. Fumi glances over at me curiously. “Fumi,” I mutter. “Would Elena have been able to reach the ballast bulbs from the Cord?”

He thinks about it for a moment “I think so, maybe.”

“Then she _must_ have gone there,” I tell him. I can feel an idiot grin spreading across my cheeks. “She just _must_ have. She would have known none of the other ranger stations nearby would have had anything to keep her going, the ballast, wouldn’t it have – wouldn’t it have healed her?”

“I don’t know,” Fumi says. “Maybe. There were never any tests done on major trauma like that. It might have, but…”

“Think about it,” I tell him. “It would have been her only shot. Right?”

He sighs. “Roan, I don’t know…”

“Fuck it,” I blurt. “Even if it’s a long shot it’s the only thing we’ve got to go off of. It’s either she’s _maybe_ alive in the Domes right now or she’s dead in a ranger station someplace deeper, right? So it’s worth checking.”

“Okay, fine. It’s worth checking.”

“So how do we get there from here?” I ask. “You’re the ranger, you’re going to know this place better than I do.”

We spend the next thirty minutes or so poring over the little 3-D maps stored in our suits’ computer drives. It’s limited and sketchy in places – a result, Fumi says, of the Pit’s movements and shifts slowly making the maps inadequate and out of date. The area around the wrecked LVC is the sketchiest of all, just because it’s a no-go zone for Company personnel, orders passed down from high up, making sure nobody disturbs the wreckage or manages to dislodge it and let it slip further down the gullet. He sees my worried look and waves it aside. Two people moving around inside aren’t going to cause any trouble.

Eventually we have a plan, although not, in my opinion, a particularly good one. There’s a way to get to the passage to the ballast bulbs, Fumi thinks, through a puckered dent in the side of the LVC, but after that it’ll be an eight-foot drop onto a metal gantry that may or may not be still intact or still walkable that should then lead us downwards into a esophageal opening that will let us detour back around to the ballast bulbs, although there’s a chance we might instead slip into a digestion sink and die a horrible death over a course of several hours.

No matter how unlikely Fumi assures me that last part is, just him saying it makes me worry. I remember the first time I watched Return of the Jedi I had nightmares for a week straight about that horrible mouth thing in the ground. I’d wake up with all my covers thrown off and covered in sweat with a terrible, suffocating dream retreating from my waking mind like a puff of smoke. I was eight or so, so maybe it was excusable, but I remember it striking some as-yet-unplucked string of horror somewhere deep in me, which looking back on it is a little strange as I’ve never been incredibly claustrophobic. Maybe it’s the concept of being eaten that does it, I remember feeling the same horrible tingling cringe aching its way up my back and setting my nerves on edge while I watched that bird thing wing away into the darkness with Marcus’ limp body in its claws.

We’ve rested long enough. It might not be a good plan but it’s a plan, and I’ll take it.

But before we can get moving, the radios at our waists crackle into life, and I hear Makado’s clipped, angry voice calling my name.

* * *  
  


“Roan Dzilenski,” Makado says, then repeats it again. “Roan Dzilenski, come in. Roan, come in, over.”

I reach down for the radio but Fumi grabs my wrist and shakes his head. He’s looking at me differently and I realize that he still thinks my name is Merriweather. I open my mouth to explain but before I can Makado interrupts again.

“Alright Roan,” she says. “I guess you aren’t going to answer. That’s fine. I’m using the low-band in the Tunneler so I know you can hear me. I got a call from the boys in the Control Center. One of them made it up to the surface and called down to warn me. Could barely understand him over the broken nose. Heard that was your doing.”

Despite myself, I can feel a little bead of fear trickling down and sinking into the pit of my stomach. _She knows I’m down here_.

As though she’s reading my mind, Makado declares that she knows I’m down here. “You too, Fumi,” she says. “I know what you’re up to. And I’m warning you,” she growls, her voice barely distinguishable from the static wreathing it, “if you try to fuck this up for me, I’ll kill you myself.”

“Jesus Christ,” I murmur.

“She does sound a little unhinged, doesn’t she?” Fumi observes.

“Does she think we’re trying to stop her from getting the crystal?”

“I guess so,” he shrugs. “So, uh –“

“Should I say something back?”

“No, don’t. There’s a chance she’s trying to bait us into replying so that they can triangulate our position. Every radio signal in here goes through a number of repeaters and they keep logs of everything.”

“Right,” I say. “Of course.”

We’re silent for a little while, waiting to see if Makado says anything else, but she’s gone again. I shudder to myself, even amid the body-temp heat and the drooling humidity.

Fumi breaks the silence finally. “I thought your name was Merriweather?” he asks, glancing at me, and I blow out a sigh.

“It’s a long, _long_ story,” I tell him, and Fumi shrugs.

“We’ve got a while to go to get to the Domes,” he says. “I don’t mind listening.”

And so with nothing better to do, I tell him. I nods along, giving me a little encouraging grunt when I flag. The whole story comes spilling out of me and I feel a little bit better having told it. We walk through dusty concourse after dusty concourse, here and there circumnavigating debris and rubble, great swathes of concrete wreckage blocking our paths, here and there gawking at relatively ancient displays and signage and froufrou and bricabrac. The floor doesn’t collapse on us, something horrible and fleshy doesn’t reach out and grab me and spew acid into my face, it’s quiet and dead and a little creepy, really, but having Fumi there makes me feel a little better about it.

At the end of it I glance over at Fumi. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” I tell him. “Or at least mislead you. Withheld information.”

“It’s okay,” he says.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s fine.”

“You’re not –“

“Look, don’t worry about it, okay?”

“Okay,” I tell him. I feel as though whatever might have been building between us, whatever kind of rapport I could have cooked up has shattered now. “I just –“

“Do you really love Elena?” he asks me, and I blush. I’d thought about lying and saying that I hadn’t said it but when I got that part of the story it had just come bursting out of me. I’d wanted to tell someone.

“I don’t – I think I do,” I offer, knowing it sounds lame even as I say it. “I don’t have a lot of experience,” I confess. “I feel very strongly for her but I don’t know if it really is…love. Whatever that is.“

Fumi thinks about that for a while, his boots crunching in the dusty remains of a storefront window. We pass the wreckage of something called a Chili’s Too, whatever that is, and my stomach growls.

“I think that if that’s how you feel, even if it was just for that moment, even if nothing comes of it, it was good to tell her.”

“Yeah,” I murmur.

For a long while there is nothing to say. It’s slow work picking our way through the LVC. The bit we need to get to is on the opposite side of the structure entirely and it seems every few minutes we come to wreckage we have to detour around or traverse somehow.

It happens after one of these, where a chunk of cement and rebar has fallen from the ceiling and I climb up and over it to try and see if there’s a decent way around, while Fumi waits, hands on his hips, watching me try and climb up with my bum leg. He offered to go instead but the gap I want to get at is too small for him, he wouldn’t be able to fit through it. When I get to the other side I come down heavy on the cracked tiled floor and I feel it shift beneath me, instantly sending a tremor of worry scurrying up my legs. I put my hands out to the sides as though I’m trying to balance myself, as though that could possibly help, but before I can scramble back to safety the floor cracks beneath me and a whole segment of the walkway ahead drops downwards, landing with an absolutely cacophonous crash that seems like it shakes the entire LVC. I lose my balance and splat headfirst onto the makeshift slide that’s formed in front of me and find myself slipping downwards at an alarming velocity. I try to roll, to put my hands out to stop myself, but I still end up ramming shoulder-first into a collection of tables and chairs, sending them flying. The impact knocks the wind out of me and for a moment I lie there on my back wheezing before I have the wherewithal to pop my helmet and suck in grateful gulps of the stale, humid air. There’s a creaking sound behind me and I see the rest of the floor finally give up the ghost and fall as well. I can hear Fumi scrabbling in the wreckage and then I think I see his silhouette pop up over the bannister.

“Are you okay?” Fumi calls down to me, and I haul myself to my feet and dust myself off.

“Yeah,” I yell back up once I’ve recovered my breath. “I think I’m okay, I haven’t broken anything. I don’t think I can get back up, though.”

“Just sit tight,” Fumi tells me. “I’ll find a way to get down to you, just give me a minute.”

“Wait, are we still going to be able to get where we need to go from down here?”

“Look, we’ll figure it out, don’t worry. Just sit tight.”

I can hear his footsteps move away and then I am alone, here at the bottom of the concourse, surrounded by chunks of tile that fell with me. I guess it was just luck that we hadn’t come to a weak spot like this in the floor up until this point, and then bad luck that I was the one to tread on it first. Plus, of course, if I hadn’t twisted so I could wasn’t going legs-first, and if the drop had been a little deeper…still knocked the wind out of me, though, and my shoulder is going to be aching for a while.

My leg is okay and that’s all that matters at this point. If I re-break my already abused shin I’m going to be up you-know-which creek with zero paddles, especially down here, and I don’t much like the idea of having to beg Makado or the FBI to come get me so they can lock me up for forever.

The fall knocked out my flashlight. I’m praying it isn’t broken but it seems like the bulb is alright, I can’t see anything wrong with that. Maybe it’s gotten loose? No, that’s not it, I unscrew the top and check it but the bulb’s in firmly. When I click the button it winks on and then winks out again.

I utter a muffled curse and shake the damn thing, then smack it hard with my free hand. I’m beginning to get a little paranoid, standing here alone in the dark, especially now that Fumi’s footsteps have faded away.

I click the flashlight on again and this time it finally stays lit, although it flickers a little. I’m in sort of a lower concourse, some place that might have once been a food court judging by the tables and chairs strewn all over the place. I turn slowly, sweeping the light around me, getting a sense of it. Over there a maintenance corridor, over there a wrecked and disfigured self-serve stroller rental kiosk, over there someone’s purse, abandoned for four long years. I wonder what I’d find if I looked inside it, what I’d learn about the woman who’d dropped it in a panic when the LVC started to lurch.

I continue my slow spin and then pause; the light is catching on something that doesn’t look man-made at all, a sort of plated shell made from something like enamel. I think to begin with that it might be the remains of a fallen light fixture but it’s much too large for that. I sweep the flashlight further over it and then when my sluggish brain finally catches up with what I’m seeing and interprets it I jump so hard I nearly drop the flashlight. A shriek boils up my throat and I leap backwards, bowling over a couple of tables and falling to the floor in the process, landing hard enough on my forearms that I can hear the bone creak.

There, lurking in the darkness with its outstretched hand lying spiderlike on the floor just a few feet away from me, its armored, bulldoggish head glaring beadily at me, is an enormous, pale-white abyssal copepod.

I try to get to my feet and sprint away but my right leg buckles when I try to put weight on it, and I end up collapsing there, trying to scurry away like a rat, cringing in anticipation for the thing’s enormous hand to fix around my leg or my arm and drag me like a morsel to its waiting mouth.


	6. Chapter 6

Rough hands are patting at my shoulders and then they get a grip beneath my armpits and haul me to my feet. Someone is saying something to me but I’m too far gone to hear them properly. I bat at them weakly but then they grab my arms and clamp them to my sides and their grip is far too strong to break. “C-c-copepod,” I stammer, blinking furiously, finally realizing that it’s Fumi. “There’s a copepod just there,” I say, rolling my eyes to try and indicate that it’s behind us. “We have to run!” I shriek.

“Calm down,” Fumi tells me. “Roan, calm down. Roan, listen –“

“Fumi, it’s right there, it’s –“

“Calm down!” he barks, and then strides directly into the darkness, heading straight for it. I nearly lose my mind with terror.

“What the fuck are you doing –“ I start, trying to tug him away, but he slips his shoulder out of my grasp. He flicks his flashlight up and shines it on the pale white carapace of the copepod and I realize it hasn’t moved an inch from when I first saw it, its hand outstretched ahead of it, its hindquarters curled around to the side. Its other arm is in pieces, I see, and on the other side, the side I couldn’t see from the front, its banded chitinous plates have shattered like so much milk-white glass. Inside it’s completely hollow. Even its eyes lack the beady menace I had ascribed to them earlier and instead are dull and flat and lifeless. I can feel the chuckle building in my throat and I clamp down it hard so I don’t burst into insane laughter.

“It’s a model,” I titter, and Fumi looks back at me with a half-grin on his shaggy face.

“It’s a model,” he confirms with a nod. “It used to hang up there,” he points to the ceiling, and when we sweep our flashlights skyward I can see the mounts where it once would have been suspended.

Once my chuckle has died down I find one of the more solid chairs scattered around the lower concourse and flip it upright. “Can we take a break for a little bit?” I ask Fumi, and without a word he gets a chair of his own and sets it up next to mine before taking a slim flask from an inner pocket of his suit and offering it to me. I have to tug off my suit’s glove with my teeth before I have the dexterity to unscrew the stopper on it, and when I do it hits me right in the back of the throat with a piercing woody smell. “What is this?” I ask, glancing over at him, and he laughs.

“Whiskey,” he says. “Not much of a drinker?”

“No,” I grimace. “Never have been. I’m small so I’m a lightweight and I don’t like the feeling of being drunk. And then, of course, the option is to drink for taste, but if you’re drinking something where you can’t taste the alcohol it’s even easier to forget about it and get _really_ drunk, so…”

“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

“Exactly,” I say. I take a swig of the whiskey anyway and try to resist making a face. “And then of course I’ve never been a huge fan of the taste.”

“Why don’t you like the feeling of being drunk? I think that’s what most people drink for. You know, less inhibition. That kind of thing.”

“Maybe inhibition is a good thing.”

Fumi grunts and takes a swig himself, a larger one than I did, and his face remains impassive as he swallows, even though I know the peaty, smoky stuff must be burning its way down his esophagus right now. Makes me wince just thinking about it, but I guess he likes it.

“So you never drink?” he asks, and I shrug.

“Occasionally I do. With friends, you know, if they’re drinking but you’re not it’s easy to get left out. I’ll get wine and nurse it for a while. Back in college I drank more but my boyfriend worked at a bar so the two probably coincided.”

“Was this the guy who gave you HIV?” I blow out a big breath. “I was just curious,” he says, apparently anticipating that I’d be sensitive about it. “If you don’t want to talk about it it’s –“

“No, it’s okay,” I say quickly. “I, um, I had actually forgotten about it until you brought it up,” I chuckle.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to –“

“No, really, it’s okay. I, uh…when I got the test back I went crazy for a little bit. I was so scared,” I tell him, thinking back to that heart-pounding day when the letter had come in the mail. I’d had to read it four times for the words to sink in and then I called Thor and screamed at him until my voice, raw and hoarse, had failed me. He’d had no words for me after the castigation I’d given him, and when he had drawn breath to try and say something, after I’d worn out all the fury I had and was left gasping on a solid bedrock of terror, I had hung up on him and blocked him on everything I could think to.

“I can imagine,” Fumi says. His tone is low and sympathetic. “I can’t imagine what I’d do if I found out that I’d tested positive.”

“Well,” I laugh, trying to keep it from sounding bitter. “Don’t be a slut and it won’t be a problem for you.”

“That’s true,” he concedes, “But from what you were saying it seemed like it was because _he_ was being a slut that you got it, not from anything you were doing. If that’s the case then he was the one who should have been more responsible.”

Faced suddenly with the daunting task of having to summarize my relationship with Thor I can’t do anything but laugh. Fumi waits for me patiently. “I don’t want to make excuses for him,” I say, “and he should have been more careful. But – I don’t know. Have you ever been in a relationship that you knew was bad for you but you kept going back because it was comfortable and safe?”

“I don’t think I have.”

“Well, that’s what it was like. I never wanted to just – to just quit. We’d take breaks and ‘see other people’ but what that really meant was he’d go and sleep with a new girl every weekend and I’d maybe think about going to a bar and chatting someone up and having some quick anonymous no-commitment sex but I’d never actually do it.”

“And you knew about that and stayed with him anyway?”

I can feel myself flushing but I bite it back down. “It wasn’t like he was _cheating_ on me,” I say, trying hard not to sound defensive. “We were – we were taking a break. We weren’t together so technically –“

“Okay, this seems like a sensitive topic, so I’m going to just –“

“I sound pathetic, don’t I?” I mutter, and Fumi sighs.

“It’s not my place to judge,” he tells me, and I laugh.

“Oh, bullshit,” I tell him. Even if you try not to you’re still going to judge me for my decisions. Thor was –“

“He was using you,” Fumi interjects smoothly. “Regardless of what I think of you, surely you have to see that’s what it was. Would he have been okay with you sleeping around as much as he did while you were taking a ‘break?’” I open my mouth and then close it. Fumi nods sagely. “I didn’t think so.”

“I didn’t say anything,” I point out.

“All I’m saying,” he says, passing the flask back to me, “is that you are _objectively_ attractive enough to not have to put up with that shit. I’m not saying you’re a supermodel, but look at yourself, you’re thin, you’re in-shape, you’ve got a pretty face, you’re sharp as hell, why put up with that? Maybe I don’t get it, maybe I’m coming at it from too male of a perspective, but –“

“It isn’t that simple,” I tell him.

“Then explain it to me.”

The liquid burns its way down my throat again but this time I’m ready for it. “Christ,” I mutter. I shake my head, drag myself back to the point. “We met in college. He was sweet to me, and he was hot. That was enough for me to be interested to begin with. He –“

“I’m not talking about when you first met,” Fumi says. I glare at him. “What was so great about him that made you want to stay when he started treating you like that? You said you were together for six years, if he treats you like that starting at year, what, four? Five? That’s not a relationship that’s going to last. That’s not –“

“Do you want to fuck me, Fumi? Is that what this is about?” I growl at him. “Because you’re not going to psychoanalyze your way into my pants. I –“

“No!” he blurts. He seems shocked that I even made that assumption. “Of course not! I’m just trying to understand –“

“Why?” I ask. I’m feeling combative and I know it’s counter-productive, I know I don’t need to antagonize Fumi right now, I know it’s a bad idea, but I can’t stop myself. “Why do you even care?”

“Is that even a real question? Of course I care. I’d be stupid not to care. For the time being I’m stuck down here with you and even if I hated your guts – which I don’t, by the way – taking care of you means that you can watch my back, you can help me out if we get into trouble. I want to make sure Elena’s okay just as much as you do,” he tells me, and I bite my lip. “I’m not the enemy here.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I was –“

“You were stressed. It’s fine, it’s reasonable. Shit, back in the Control Center I was stressed and you weren’t helping,” he laughs. “But we’ll deal with the backlash for that when we deal with it.”

A silence passes between us, but at least it’s comfortable.

“You want to know why I stayed with him? With Thor?” I ask, looking over, catching his gaze in mine. I don’t have the willpower to stay angry at him. I keep my voice carefully even. I don’t want him to think I’m getting drunk, even if I can feel it after that extra-large slug I took. “It’s not because of the sex, I know that’s what you’re assuming but that isn’t it. I stayed with him because unlike everything else in my life he didn’t turn to shit as soon as I clung on to him.”

I give Fumi a lingering glance before I strip my other glove off and clasp my hands together, inclined loosely down in a v, my elbows resting on my knees. I stare at the dirty tile. “I’m a loser,” I tell him. “I got a degree and haven’t done anything worthwhile with it, I got a job at a paper in Corpus Christi because the editor is my aunt’s ex-husband, I’m not a good writer, I barely have an attention span any more, I don’t have any friends. I don’t keep friends, I don’t have anybody I talk to, I don’t have anybody I want to talk to. Thor was the one kind of good thing in my life and he made it easy for me to overlook all the shit he did do because he halfway gave a damn about me most of the time. It’s like I have all these great ideas,” I say, “all this shit I’m going to do. I was going to write a novel, I had a great idea for it, I was going to at least write it, but I haven’t worked on it in years, I open up the document on my computer and I stare at it and then I close it again because it’s shit. I’m not finished,” I say, holding up my hand. Fumi shuts his mouth. I lick my lips. It feels like I ought to shut up, it feels like I should just stop while I’m ahead but I can’t. Once I’ve started I have to just let it all come spilling out of me like that first time my parents made me go to Confession and I told the priest about the time I imagined I called my mom a bitch behind her back because she made me come inside when it was getting late.

“Thor was like, the one thing I didn’t fuck up, and in hindsight I clung to him like a drowning rat. I can see myself doing the same fucking thing with Elena,” I say, finally putting it into words, forcing myself to consider it instead of shoving it back down into my subconscious. “I can see myself doing it with her because she’s nice to me and she – and she doesn’t seem like she’s going to turn to shit and I’m so fucking scared that I’m just going to glom onto her and leech all of the good out of her like the worthless fucking –“

“Roan,” Fumi says gently, and I stop. “What the hell happened to make you like this?” he asks, and, unable to think of anything better to do, I tell him.

* * *

Every breath I take is like a dagger of ice sliding down my throat and finding a sheath somewhere in my lungs. I can see my exhalations turning solid in front of me, and it feels like my nose has been transmuted to ice. When I wrinkle it it’s like I’m doing it at one remove, like I’m wrinkling someone else’s nose.

There’s no snow, not yet, at least; dad thinks that it might in a few days but right now it’s cold and clear and almost unbearably crisp. The evergreens are dazzling.

I love it.

We spent at least an hour last night in the tent debating the various merits of hot chocolate versus dehydrated apple cider; my dad was a fan of hot chocolate and kept pointing out to me that you couldn’t put the tiny little marshmallows in apple cider, even when I demonstrated that you _could_ but that it was a really bad idea.

In the morning he made me pancakes in the sea-green camp stove, and plenty of syrup and bacon and rehydrated eggs, although I turned my nose up at those last – too chalky, and then he had shown me how to clean the revolver.

The revolver. The thing had dominated my dreams the night before; nothing so blunt as a nightmare about shooting or being shot, but just – the gun. Almost animate, almost a character. I had a sense that we had been conversing but about what I couldn’t say. I had a sense like conversation impinging on me but like I were overhearing it through a while. That one time that we had lived in an apartment in Newark and our neighbors had had terrible fights every night – that half-scary, half-comforting sense that you weren’t alone, laying there in the dark, eyes open but just as blind as if they were closed, listening to the short little Italian next door calling his wife a whore faintly through the wall. How mom’s eyes had bulged when little seven-year-old me had asked her innocently what a whore was at breakfast the next morning. She refused to talk to dad for a whole day because he couldn’t stop laughing when I explained where I had heard that word. Good times.

The revolver. I can conceptualize shooting something with it; I can imagine myself doing it, but now, out in the cold with the gun shining in my dad’s hand, long-snouted and blocky and _mean_ , it seems harder. I’m acutely aware that this is something that most girls my age aren’t doing, even the tomboys. I remember the fight that my mom and dad had gotten into before we left on our trip, I remember her yelling at my dad that I wasn’t a boy no matter how much he had wanted one, and I remember him yelling back that it didn’t matter whether I was a boy or a girl it was an experience he wanted to share with his only child goddam it, and so on.

I hadn’t thought very hard on it. On part of the drive up I kept looking over at him and trying to work up the nerve to ask him if what mom had said had really been true and that he really would have preferred a son, but I wasn’t able to.

“Here’s a good spot,” he tells me. We hunker down at the top of a ridge or ravine. There’s a small clearing ahead, down the cliff, and then the woods continue unabated past it. The wind gusts up momentarily and clap my hands to my head reflexively to keep it from carrying off the deerstalker hat that I had insisted my dad buy for me at the general store just before we left town and headed into the woods. He had pointed out how silly I was going to look wearing it, especially with the plaid lumberjack shirt I insisted on wearing, but I wasn’t so easily repressed. He joked and called me Holden Caulfield and I didn’t get it, not having had to read that book in school yet, and on our walk into the woods he had (badly) summarized _The Catcher in the Rye_ for me. Two years later I’d finally read the real thing in a high school literature class and find that my expectations were radically different from the way the book actually goes; he had somehow managed to conflate it with _Fahrenheit 451_ , which is at least in the same English-lit ballpark, but I was massively disappointed at how uncool and whiny Holden turned out to be compared to the Holden I had imagined.

I was so tickled by this that I had written to my father to express my joking displeasure and he had written a rather lengthy letter back to me and one thing had lead to another and I had ended up forgiving him, even though I hadn’t intended to.

“Here’s a good spot,” he tells me, and we hunker down and settle in and for several hours we see nothing at all. We’re in a crosswinds, he tells me, so the deer won’t be able to smell us, or at least the deer he seems to think will mosey out of the trees down there and come to drink at the trickling little stream running through the clearing. Personally if I were a deer I think I wouldn’t bother with that stream, for it looks rather muddy and unappetizing, but maybe I’m too fastidious to be a deer.

We sit and we wait. I shift every now and then, growing bored, try to make conversation, but my dad just tells me to hush, staring intently out across the clearing at the treeline.

The revolver is perched on the edge of the bluff like a bird balancing on its tail, the two little legs up near the barrel splayed wide to keep it balanced, settled heavily on the tail-like tripod of its handle. I keep staring at it; there’s a tiny bit of mud flecked onto the dark leather of the grip and I reach out and scratch at it before dad glances over at me and takes my hands off of the revolver.

“Careful,” he tells me. I start to talk back but stop myself and return my gaze to the treeline. After a few moments I hear my father take a sharp breath. “I think we’ve got a deer,” he tells me. I try to follow his gaze but I’m not sure where he’s looking; even when I squint it seems like the trees are all still just trees, the patchy undergrowth still just undergrowth.

“I wish we had some binoculars,” I start, but dad shushes me.

“There,” he says. “Do you see that big bush just in the middle of the treeline? Follow that to the left two, three, four trees, and then look in between…”

“I see it,” I breathe. There _is_ something moving in there in the undergrowth. I can’t tell whether it’s a deer or not but dad doesn’t seem to care much. About an hour ago he’d joked that he’d be willing to take a potshot at a rabbit at this point but we hadn’t seen anything living for so long that I’d been ready to give up and go back to our tent and have some more apple cider.

“Okay Roan,” he says, “get ready.” I feel a hot jolt of anticipation fork like lightning through me.

“Shouldn’t we wait to make sure it’s a deer?”

He shakes his head. “We’ve got no idea how long it’ll stick around,” he tells me. “It’s big enough to be a deer, if it was a bear it’d be bigger, and there haven’t been wolves around here in a long time. Go and line up the shot like yesterday.”

“But it’s behind all the undergrowth,” I point out. “How will I know where to - ?”

“Roan, I know you’re nervous. But it’s okay. Go ahead and line up the shot.”

So I take the revolver, heart pounding, and fumble with it for a little bit until I manage to get the barrel lined up with the patch of undergrowth. I can see the movement still and it seems to me that if it’s a deer shape the center of it would be just about…there.

I think I see a peek of orange through the scrub brush. I frown. “Dad,” I start.

“It’s okay, Roan,” he says. I can feel a faint hint of impatient anxiety gnawing at the back of his voice. “Take the shot. Remember to squeeze the trigger gently.”

“But I thought I saw –“

“Do you want it to get away?” he asks, glancing over at me. His voice has grown harder. “Do you want to sit out here for a couple more hours waiting for something else to walk by? Take the shot. Time’s wasting.”

He’s doing it again. Just a few weeks ago he reduced me to tears when I had wanted to watch the previews on a DVD by talking constantly and patronizingly at me, saying that the movie was starting and that if I didn’t switch over to the DVD player I would be missing it. He ignored everything I said when I tried to explain that I was switched over already and I just wanted to watch the previews and then when he wouldn’t stop talking at me with greater and greater venom in his voice I just broke down and cried and skipped the previews and got to the main menu. He never apologized to me.

Something in me hardens like glass. I will not subject myself to this again.

“- if you don’t take the shot then I guess we’ll have to sit out here until nightfall, so that’s another four or five hours of us freezing our asses off, but if that’s what you want I guess that –“

I pull the trigger. The gun roars and cuts off the drone of my father’s voice. I’m breathing heavily and my cheeks are burning but I didn’t drop the gun this time, I rode the recoil out, let it jolt up my shoulder and down my back and through. The bushes on the other side of the clearing rustle once and then fall still and I imagine I can hear something cry out in pain. My dad whoops and pulls me upright and swoops me into an enormous bear hug and then we tramp down the ridge and off across the clearing to see what I’ve shot.

My father pushes the brush aside and we stand there, staring, as a growing wave of nausea and panic claws at me and hollows me out, as my mouth drops open and I try to scream but I haven’t got the breath to. For there, lying supine on the ground on his back, is a young man of maybe eighteen or nineteen, wearing a bright orange vest, with a rifle of his own fallen to the ground next to him, and with a bullet hole punched through his neck, the bright arterial blood sprayed out behind him like a halo, a bullet hole that just five minutes ago I put there.

* * *

“Jesus Christ,” Fumi mutters. I snort out a faint chuckle through my nose.

“You _did_ ask,” I point out.

“What happened afterwards?”

“Well,” I say, getting up and stretching, “my dad went to jail for involuntary manslaughter. Five years. I was pretty fucked up about it. I tried to convince the police that I did it and that he didn’t have anything to do with it, that I was alone in the woods, but obviously when you’re twelve and not thinking straight you can’t really put together a good story.”

“Jesus,” Fumi repeats.

“My mom blamed me, of course. Which lead to a pretty shitty high school experience. I was supposed to go to therapy but my mom got real apathetic real fast, and my dad, you know, he’d write to her from prison and try to get her to take care of me properly but she didn’t want to. It, uh.” I swallow. “It kind of fucked me up. I was really scared to do anything by myself or try anything new because I got it into my head that if I tried it would be wrong and I could fuck up and something bad would happen. Which is a stupid mindset but when you’re a kid and you don’t have very many means of support it’s what you’ve got. Didn’t have a boyfriend until college, didn’t really do anything until college. My dad was out of prison by then but he and my mom had gotten divorced, and when I left for college I never really came back. I don’t speak to my mom at all any more and I…I always think I’m going to talk to my dad but I never do. Not really. He’s got cancer now and when he told me I let the phone go to voicemail. It took me a week to call him back.”

“Roan,” Fumi starts. His voice is very gentle. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Of course I know it wasn’t my fault!” I snap. Fumi actually recoils and I squeeze my eyes shut. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “Really, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – to yell at you. I’m sorry. But this is the reason why I never tell anybody this, I haven’t even told Elena this, it’s because when a normal person hears a story like that they assume that you have to be _damaged_ somehow, you have to be broken. All of a sudden you aren’t a person they can relate to and treat as an equal, you’re a project, or you’re pathetic. I know it wasn’t my fault but for a big chunk of the last fifteen years I was carrying that weight and it’s hard to change that. That’s why I stuck with Thor as long as I did, because he didn’t treat me like that after I told him, and because he made me feel normal. He taught me that I wasn’t going to fuck things up just by existing. Of course the relationship turned to shit afterwards but it was always going to, we pretended that we were super compatible and everything but aside from physical attraction we didn’t have a lot in common. Six or seven years of that and things turn rotten.

That’s the story,” I say. I feel a little better for having told it. I shrug, wondering if I’m being too melodramatic. “This whole thing with HIV, it was just another kick in the gut. So when I met Elena, I don’t know, I got attached. I don’t want to fuck up with her like I did with Thor, like I did with everything else. And if that means dying down here to try and get her back,” I say, trying very hard to keep my voice from quavering, “then so be it. I’m done being the scared little girl I have been for a long time. Coming down here, investigating the Pit, getting involved in all this shit – maybe it was stupid but it was what I wanted to do.”

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me,” Fumi says, and I laugh.

“I know,” I tell him. “Really, I know. I just don’t want you to think of me differently. I know you _do_ , but –“

“I don’t,” he says, too quickly. “I’m incredibly honored that you’d share something like that with me –“

“No, it’s okay,” I tell him. “I _know_ you think of me differently. The me you thought I was is someone completely different now. How could you possibly _not_ think of me differently? What I don’t want is for you to _treat_ me differently. I’m not going to fall apart,” I assure him, hoping fervently that it’s true. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he nods.

“Okay,” I echo. “Let’s go get Elena.”

It takes us only about five minutes or so to get moving, sealing our suits, checking we’ve got all of our equipment and so on. I retighten my boot, Fumi tucks the flask back into his inner pocket. Another two or three minutes checking the map, getting oriented. And then there’s no putting it off any further; we glance at each other but there’s nothing to say. We walk forward into the darkness, our flashlights cutting a swath through the four years’ worth of humid air and dust and memory accumulated down here in the bowels of the Lower Visitor Center, hoping beyond hope that Elena might still be alive.


	7. Chapter 7

“Fumi?”

“Yeah?”

“Tell me a story.”

“A story?” he says, glancing over. In the vent there’s nothing but the soft squelching of our cleated feet and a drip-drip-drip of a flowing river of sluggish, phlegmy mucus running along a divot over on the left. I nod.

“Yeah, a story. Like, about work. Ranger stuff. I’m sure you’ve got some good stories.”

He laughs. “A few, maybe,” he concedes.

Getting across into the actual flesh of the Pit from the wreck of the LVC had been easier than either of us had thought it would be. The gantry we had been looking for was long gone by the time that we got to the bottom of the LVC, with the only evidence of its passing being a couple of rigid metal rods and torn, rusted grating, but above us was our lucky break – due to the way the Visitor Center had fallen, it had actually cut into the Pit’s gullet on the way down, leaving a long, jagged scar of porous tissue in its wake and, at the very bottom, a gaping, partially-healed hole leading directly into what Fumi said was once the trail downwards to the Gastric Sea. It was a little hairy to begin with; the wound had ruined the previously neat trail, and the Pit had begun to reclaim it. Paths branched off, seemingly at random, that our maps had no record of. Here and there we’d see skittering things darting away from our flashlights, fleeing into pores or deeper, smaller vents we couldn’t see into.

Just copepods, Fumi had said when I asked. Harmless unless you’re alone and they’re feeling particularly brave or hungry. But even so I noticed that he kept his hand resting comfortably on the butt of his pistol, ready to draw it at a moment’s notice, and so I emulated him, and kept a wary eye behind us as we picked our way through the nest of tunnels and warrens and veins.

After I while I became afraid that we might hit a dead end and that we’d not be able to get through to the trail proper, which Fumi said would curve up and around down to the ballast bulbs, but just when I was getting to the point where I thought I might say something about it the vent widened out and Fumi had let out a triumphant whoop. We’re on the right track now, he had assured me, pointing to where we were on the map, and I had let a little involuntary shudder of relief pass over me because finally, _finally_ we could really get going.

Now we’re clambering through a stinking vent that once housed a pedestrian trail. The thing Fumi hadn’t really mentioned is how _long_ it would take. The path that looked so easy and short was in actuality four or five miles, a solid two or three hour hike in an environment like the Pit. My leg is holding up alright so far, especially now that I’m doing less running and jumping and falling, but I don’t think I’ll be able to do more than a couple days’ worth of this. Even with the boot I put my foot down occasionally and get a worrying, bone-deep twinge like a jolt of electricity, feeling like it’s running up some magic conduit from my heel all the way to the top of my head.

You can still see the remains of the trail here and there. Plastic placards, partially dissolved and stained beyond legibility, peeking out from behind masses of tumorous flesh. Rusty chain-link here and there, little strips of it grown over by pale, moisture-slick skin. If you look too closely at anything down here you shudder.

“Alright, I’ve got a story for you,” Fumi says. “Most of the work we do involves escorting supplies down to the deeper installations within the Pit, looking after science teams, making sure nothing and nobody bothers the few little extractions operations for stuff like ballast and bone plates. It’s a lot of wildlife control, basically. Very, very occasionally we’d do interdiction stuff. People get in, try to hide out in here, do all kinds of crap. I remember hearing a story about some guys who were running a drug lab in a trailer out on the very edge of the restricted area on the surface. Only got busted because Makado had to rush out somewhere in a hurry for something or other, I don’t remember what exactly, and she took a helicopter and they happened to fly right over. That really made her crack down on the topside ranger teams, let me tell you.”

“Topside?”

“So basically there are two teams,” he explains. “Us, the Sergeant’s team, we’re Venterial Ops. Anything underground, inside the Pit, we handle. That’s why we have Elena, for example. I don’t know if she told you but her main specialization is cave diving, she used to be in the Coast Guard. The other team is larger, they hang out in the other barracks topside. Overland Ops patrols the surface of the restricted area, handles anything that doesn’t concern the actual Pit itself. A lot of people don’t realize this but the restricted area isn’t just, you know, the Pit, it covers a whole lot of the ground above as well. You need manpower if you’re going to patrol it. With me so far?”

“Yes,” I nod. “So the overland team, they never go down into the Pit?”

“Oh, they train in it occasionally,” Fumi says, waving his hand. “But not to the extent that we do. It’s expensive and difficult and time-consuming just because the Pit is not a particularly good environment to make mistakes in. What if you can’t recognize a digestive pit or a triocanth sign? I mean, there are so many ways to die down here if you’re careless, especially now that we’ve cut down on our impact down here so much. If you’re stuck down here your options are either getting to the Control Center, getting to one of the very few listening stations and outposts we still have down in the depths of the Pit, or trying to call for help. That’s it.”

“So it’s easier logistically to have two separate groups like that?”

“Yeah, exactly. It hurts the overhead a little but if everybody was Pit-trained they’d be spending even _more_ on them, so…”

“Right,” I say. There’s a long stringy mass of fibrous tissue stretching from the roof to the pitted ground, and I duck around it, let Fumi pass behind. “So what was the story?”

“Oh, right. So we were escorting some science folks down to that listening station in Oyster’s Shame. Shift change, essentially, except they way they do it is two weeks on, two weeks off. They rotate like that, make sure nobody’s spending too much time down in the Pit, that kind of thing. There are health checks that they have to do. If you’re in Science, half the time you’re up in a lab over in the science building doing egghead things and the other half you’re down here in a lab doing egghead things,” he laughs.

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” I suggest, and Fumi nods.

“Exactly. So we’re taking these guys down, pretty simple trip, one we’ve all done dozens of times. One of the science guys is new, and he is just absolutely gushing over everything he’s seeing down here. Some sort of environmental scientist type, real nerd. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a nerd but sometimes you just – certain people fulfill the stereotype more than other people, right? Anyway, Crookshank decides to play a prank on the guy. We’re taking a break for lunch and Crookshank pretends to lick a nerve ending in the wall. Now, first off, don’t ever do that, but Crookshank is – was – a maniac and you can’t keep him down. This egghead sees Crookshank do it and starts to freak out, but Crookshank is like ‘oh, it’s cool, it enhances the flavor in these MREs, you should try it.’ And of course Slate gets in on it, because Slate has – er, had – the mind of a middle-schooler and can’t resist clowning around, and together they gradually convince this nerd that it makes your standard run-of-the-mill MRE taste orgasmic.”

“Why shouldn’t you lick nerve endings?”

“Have you seen anything down here that you’d _want_ to lick?”

I try unsuccessfully not to think of Elena and end up just shaking my head.

“But on top of that,” Fumi continues, “Pit nerve fibers can do weird things to the human nervous system. Not usually permanent or even really harmful things…just weird things. A big one was an ability to see into the ultraviolet spectrum. You might have heard about that; they made some big breakthroughs in optics in the 80s thanks to experiments with Pit nervous tissue. But there can be weirder stuff too – occasionally you’d see some spooky things going on in the Cord thanks to all the nerve tissue there. Intrusive thoughts, ‘occult’ stuff like objects levitating, seeing things out of the corner of your eye, ‘hauntings…’ in some places down here there are still little alarms that go off if they read too much nervous activity. So you can imagine that it might be a bad idea to lick one.”

“What happened to the guy?” I ask. The further we’ve gotten the more horribly rank the air has grown, to the point where we both have put on our helmets. The path we’re following opens out after a torturously twisting, intestine-like track and we find a series of bulbous, swollen sacs protruding from the floor and the walls, filled with a noxious, chunky liquid a lot like raw vomit. I can feel my gorge rising and I fix my eyes resolutely on my feet and end up just taking shallow breaths through my mouth for the long ten or so minutes it takes for Fumi to guide me through to the other side. We squeeze through a rough, suppurating sphincter and find a set of stairs, so rusty and dilapidated they might as well have come straight out of a Silent Hill game. Here and there long strands or trickles of flesh have melted or grown through the chain-link cage surrounding the stairs and pooled in rough, saggy, wrinkled puddles on the floor. It’s such an unspeakably bizarre image that we both stop and stare at them.

“I bet those feel…absolutely horrible to step on,” Fumi says.

“I’m not stepping on any of those,” I murmur.

“And with the cleats…” Fumi continues.

“Oh god,” I say, wrinkling my nose. A particularly swollen one seems to glisten at me. “Why does it do that? Why does it grow stuff like this?”

“Why does the Pit do anything?” Fumi shrugs, jerking his head forwards. “At least we’re on the right track. This is the staircase down to the ballast bulbs.”

“Is it even safe to walk on?”

“Do you see a different option?”

“Fair point,” I grunt. I take a ginger step forward and put my weight on the stairs, cringing inwardly. My foot nudges against one of the nodules of flesh. I can feel it pressing against me through the fabric of the suit. I grimace and take another step, and then another. “Come on,” I tell him. “Let’s just get this over with.”

We get a couple of flights down before I remember. “Oh, right – what happened to the guy?”

“Which guy?”

“You know,” I say. “The nerd who licked the nerve ending.”

“Oh, right. It made him see…something. Gave him the fright of his life, ended up pissing himself in his suit.”

“Oh,” I say. I had been expecting something funny but this just seems sad. Fumi reads it in my face, nods at me.

“Yeah,” he says. “Elena actually got really pissed off at Crookshank for that one. They’ve never liked each other very much but that little stunt kind of pushed her over the edge. They got in a shouting match right there and the Sergeant had to break it up.”

I can’t stop myself from smiling. “That’s my girl,” I murmur.

“Well…”

“Well what?”

“Uh, well it turned out that she was sleeping with the nerd and that’s why she was so heated about it.”

I look at Fumi for a moment and then burst out laughing. “You’re not serious.”

“Dead serious.”

I think about it and then shrug. “What?” I ask. “Am I supposed to get jealous?”

“I just find it so strange that you aren’t.”

“That’s in the past,” I tell him. “I don’t care what she did before we met, I care about how she treats me. I mean, she has to have treated me pretty well to get me to risk my life for her like this.”

“True,” Fumi admits. “Or maybe you just don’t value your life very much.”

Before I can think of a response that would be both truthful and a denial of the accuracy of that statement, Fumi takes a step forward. As he puts his weight down on the next step the staircase groans sonorously and we both freeze. I feel a little stab of fear piercing the bottom of my stomach and reach over quickly to grab the guardrail, for all the good it’ll do me. We stand there frozen for a minute, maybe two, waiting for the entire thing to collapse, and when it isn’t forthcoming I slowly, gradually unclench my insides and put my weight back on the step.

“Jesus,” I murmur.

“Yeah, these are probably a little unsafe.”

“You think?”

The next four flights go by quickly. The blobs of flesh haven’t spread this far down, or at least they haven’t yet. The meat beyond the retaining walls, buckled in places, is a strange, waxy tone that makes it look like it’s fake. If it didn’t shudder and writhe in time with whatever alien rhythms govern the Pit’s heartbeat I’d think it were a model.

Ahead of us, rising like vapor off a bog, I can smell the stench of ballast, combined with the familiar meaty Pit-smell pervading the air, along with something earthy and sour that lingers at the back of my throat. It makes my heart race and my gorge rise simultaneously. That accidental encounter with Crookshank in the ballast bulb…I had never been so scared or so turned on in my entire life. The memory of it leaves me vaguely nauseous.

“You doing okay?” Fumi asks, nudging me.

“I’m fine,” I murmur through gritted teeth. I do _not_ want to throw up in this helmet. I take a deep breath and then let it out. I’m okay. It’s going to be fine. Elena is down here and the ballast totally healed her and everything is fine, just peachy-keen. We’re going to kiss and hold hands all the way out of here and then…

“Do you really think she’s down here?” Fumi asks.

“Where else would she be?” I say. “It’s either here or she’s dead somewhere and I’m still trying to be optimistic at least.”

Fumi says something else but I’m not paying attention. We’ve finally reached the landing, and past a pair of crooked, bent, rusted doors is something that must have once been a utility corridor for servicing the machinery used to keep the ballast pools running. The entire corridor is so thickly covered with dense, clustered mushrooms that I can scarcely see any surface that isn’t completely blotted out by coarse white fungous flesh.

“Shit,” Fumi murmurs.

The acrid, weird smell is stronger down here and I finally recognize it – it’s the reek of those horrible, throat-coating spores from the nightmare of the fungal jungle deep down in the Pit’s rancid guts, where Marcus and Peter and Erica and – and Klaus had died.

Where I had _killed_ Klaus.

Thinking about it makes me shiver. This past day – there hasn’t been time to think. Everything has been sweeping me along with the same force and velocity as a riptide. I haven’t had time to – to acknowledge it.

Unbidden, the image of him clapping his hand to his throat springs to my mind. The gun had felt like a dead weight in my hand. It hadn’t even felt like my hand, it had felt like I was controlling it at a distance, like I was playing a video game. I remember the way his eyes had widened in shock and how he had staggered back, the knife clattering out of his trembling hands. He had tried to swipe at me with it even then but the strength had left him.

I’ve already sealed my suit. I hadn’t wanted to waste the filters or the battery before by running the rebreather but these spores aren’t going to give us a choice. I don’t want to be hallucinating again.

At the end of the hallway is a door. It takes the two of us some serious effort to pry it open, levering at the rusted, mossy handle, but once we get it open we stumble into what must have once been one of the main baths. The fungus grows here too, in greater size and density. There are things living here; a dozen little things scurry and hop and slither away from us, darting away from the reach of our flashlight beams. Some of the mushrooms, the bigger blue-veined ones with the caps that look like they’re melting, visibly deflate as we rake our lights over them, puffing out clouds of hazy spores.

“I’m not sure that Elena’s here,” Fumi says softly, looking around. I feel my insides tighten even as he says it.

A massive hole has broken open in the tile over on the far end of the pool. I think I see something within it move. I reach over and tug at Fumi’s sleeve. “Fumi,” I hiss. “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“Over there,” I point. “Inside that big fucking hole, I thought I saw –“

“Whatever you saw,” Fumi tells me, “it wasn’t Elena. _If_ she even came down here, she’d have taken one look at it and then turned right around and left. You said that Erica took her helmet. Look at all these spores. Do you think that –“

“God damn!” something cries out of the murk and darkness down at the far end of the pool. The milk-white ballast seethes incontinently beneath the wan glare of our flashlights, and I can feel the bottom drop out of my stomach. “God damn!” it repeats.

“That’s Elena,” I say.

“Roan, no,” Fumi says. I shoot him a look like he’s gone mad.

“ _Listen_ to her,” I tell him. “That’s her voice! I’d know it anywhere.”

As if to punctuate my argument, the voice cries out again. “Oh god! Oh fuck!”

I charge forward, stomping into the ballast with reckless abandon. “Elena!” I call out. My heart is jumping in my chest and I have to consciously force myself not to grin madly. Elena is here! God, she’s here! I was right, she _did_ come to the ballast bulbs, she _did –_

“God damn!”

“Roan, stop!” Fumi yells from behind me. I can hear him starting to stomp after me but I don’t have an iota of brainpower left to devote to the question of why he’d want to stop me. The ballast ripples around my legs, but it’s relatively shallow, at least this end of the pool. I hope I don’t have to swim in it to get to her.

“God damn!”

“Elena, I’m coming!”

“STOP! Roan, it’s a –“

My foot catches against something in the ballast and I lose my balance. I try to catch myself on my hands but the pool deepens just ahead of me and I end up pitching face-first into the murk. “Goddam,” I mumble. I don’t know what I tripped on, it feels like a log or something, but that doesn’t make a ton of sense to be down here. What is –

The log wriggles to life and wraps itself around my ankle. I have enough time to let out a small, terrified squeak before it whips me bodily off my feet and starts tugging me through the ballast towards the hole in the tile. I hear a splash from behind me as Fumi wades it, and I realize that I’m screaming.

Another rope or vine or tentacle joins the first, and this one fixes around the thigh of my other leg. I reach down, fighting against the thing’s pull, and get my hands on my pistol. I jerk it out of the holster so fast that I almost lose it, flick the safety off, and then fire off three rounds into the darkness lurking where the tentacles converge, but I don’t think I hit anything. Another tentacle seizes around my wrist and though I try to get loose, I end up dropping the gun.

Fumi calls out from behind me but I can’t pull myself together enough to answer him. Another tentacle has fixed around my midriff, another around my neck, and it squeezes so tightly that almost immediately I see stars bursting in my eyes and everything goes off-kilter like the world’s been tilted.

My flashlight skews across the face of the thing that’s tugging me in and for a moment I can’t comprehend it. It looks like a…a flower, all folds and delicate fleshy petals, but the colors are off. I can’t think, I’m not getting enough oxygen.

A mouth opens in the center of the flower, unfolding like a piece of origami. I see delicate, foot-long, razor-sharp teeth, almost translucent in the light.

The tentacles around my neck and leg loosen, and then drop me entirely. I smack into the surface of the ballast and rapidly sink under. I’m still too woozy to do much about it other than flail my arms helplessly. The air is hot and stuffy in this helmet and I can feel a tingle somewhere along the side of my ribcage, accompanied by a stinging wetness that makes me realize my suit has a hole and ballast is leaking in.

I can’t think, my brain feels like it’s been unplugged. I’m going to drown inside my suit down here and I can’t _do_ anything about it –

The last tentacle loosens and slips away and then I feel hands tugging at my arms. Without thinking I cling to them, the slippery ballast making my grip clumsy. I batter against my rescuer, trying to get a grip on them. There’s a horrendous noise filling the air, making the ballast vibrate with the force of it. Amid the torrent of sound I can hear someone yelling at me, telling me to stop, and when I crack my eyes open I see Fumi tugging me closer to him and trying to swim us away at the same time. I get my arm around his waist and we both dip under.

“Fuck this,” he says when I come up next and then he cocks his arm back and punches me in the side of the head. I go limp immediately and for the next few minutes I am not quite unconscious but I am definitely woozy enough to let Fumi drag me bodily out of the pool and then pick me up and carry me out of that horrible room and back to the staircase we came in at.

I manage to hobble up two flights of stairs on my own before I stumble and Fumi has to let me lean on him to get up another two. Up here the air is clearer and I can finally pop my helmet and breathe in deep, grateful gulps of it without feeling the spores trickling in and lining my throat. I sit down heavily on a step that isn’t encrusted with bloody moss and lichen and give Fumi a bleak look.

“I’ve been so fucking stupid,” I mutter. Fumi tries to put his arm around me but I shrug it off. “Goddam it, I’ve been so stupid.”

“Roan –“

“Fuck!” I shout. It echoes up and down the rickety staircase, my own voice reflected back at me in a mocking tone. My neck and arms are still sore and if I close my eyes I can feel that horrible _thing’s_ tentacles or vines tugging tight around my throat and choking the life out of me…

“Roan,” Fumi tries again. “You aren’t stupid.”

“Elena was never down here,” I say. I can hear the cheerlessness in my voice. “She’s probably dead someplace ten minutes from the Cord. I should never have –“

“Roan!” Fumi barks. I look at him, not bothering to wipe my eyes.

“What?”

“Roan, you have to stop trying to throw your life away,” he says. His eyes are dark and serious and suddenly I find I can’t meet his gaze. “No, look at me,” he says.

“I’m really not into this paternal bullshit,” I start, but Fumi takes my head in his hands and very gently turns it so I don’t have any choice but to stare into his eyes. I almost slap him. At the very least I snarl out the beginning of an imprecation, but Fumi just stares me down. “I don’t –“ I start, but he shakes his head.

“Your life isn’t over,” he tells me. “You still have plenty to live for.”

“But if Elena’s dead –“

“Fuck Elena! Even if Elena were dead you’d have something to live for. When we find her do you think your relationship with her is going to last very long if you’re just hanging your entire existence off of her?”

“I – “

“I don’t need you flaking out on me right now,” he tells me. “When my boyfriend died –“

“Boyfriend?” I blurt. He gives me a tremendously nonplussed look.

“Yes,” he says. “When Ellis died, I –“

“ _Ellis?_ ”

“Oh, fuck it. Forget it,” he says, standing up. “Do whatever the hell you want, you want to be a clingy son of a bitch when we get to Elena, be my goddam guest –“

“No, Fumi, I’m sorry, I didn’t –“

“Forget it, I said,” he tells me. My cheeks are burning. I’ve gone and broken the camel’s back. Of _course_ him and Ellis were…why didn’t I see that?

“Fumi, I didn’t mean –“

“Elena’s alive,” he says, his voice harsh. “Or at least she was, recently. Because ballast sirens can only repeat sounds they’ve heard. She probably pried open a door, took one look at that place, said ‘god damn!’ and ‘oh fuck!’ and left, and the siren’s probably been parroting it back for the better part of a day since then, hoping something would be stupid enough to wander into reach…”

“How was I supposed to know?” I yell. “How was I fucking supposed to know? I’ve never heard of a fucking ballast siren! I don’t know what they do!”

“I was yelling after you telling you not to go!” Fumi shouts. “If you had just fucking listened to me you wouldn’t have –“

“Yeah, well you fucking punched me!”

“I punched you,” he hisses, taking a step towards me, “because you were fucking panicking. You were going to drag me down with you and if I let you, we both would have died back there. I had to make you go limp, so I punched you! Of course you probably would have been okay with the two of us dying, given your fucking martyrdom fetish –“

“I don’t have a martyrdom fetish!”

“Then fucking act like it!”

“Fuck you!”

“You need to calm the fuck down,” he says, pointing a finger at me. “I can’t believe you talked me into this damn-fool errand. I had no idea you were such a –“

“Fucking leave, then,” I tell him. There’s a part of my brain screaming at me to stop, but I can’t stop. I’ve already let the words out. “If I’m so much of a fucking _burden_ and too much of a _loose cannon_ then fucking leave. Just go back up. I’ll find Elena myself.”

Fumi’s face falls. When he speaks his tone is gentler. “Look, I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to –“

“Just go!” I yell, pointing up the stairs. “Just fuck off!”

“Roan, don’t do this.”

“Just leave!” I say. My voice is thick and raw and I realize that I’m crying. “I can do this myself! I don’t need you!”

“Roan, you –“

“ _Go!_ ” I shriek, and then before I know it I’m clambering to my feet and pulling up my sleeves, clenching a fist and getting ready to swing at him. Everything’s taken on a red tinge, even redder than normal down here in the Pit, and the horrible throbbing thump of my heartbeat is ringing in my ears like an immense drum.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Fumi says, throwing up his hands, and then he turns and hurries up the stairs.

I stand there for a long, long while, breathing hard, letting all of my anger drain out of me. Eventually I feel empty enough to find a nice clear spot on the rusty steps, brush away the mushrooms and polypous clumps of pooled flesh and sit. I think about burying my head in my hands, but I don’t.

After a moment I take out my radio from its holster on my belt and look at it. Fumi had warned me not to even try anything with it, he’d said that it’d be easy for anyone listening in, such as the FBI or people in the Control Center, to triangulate my position and there’d be no guarantee Elena would even have a radio to respond with if I did try to call her.

But I don’t see another choice. My hand is shaking a little and I feel as though if I stand up I’d just fall right over again. If I don’t do something I’m going to have a panic attack.

I crack the radio up to its broadest range-band and hold down the broadcast button. I can’t think of what to say. Eventually I shake my head and then lick my lips and give it my best shot. “Elena?” I ask. My voice catches a little but I swallow hard and force it back down. “Elena, it’s Roan. If you’re – if you’re out there and you can hear this, l-let me know. Please.”

I let the button go and then wait, heart pounding. I try to keep myself from counting the seconds, but I can’t. Ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty. I stop after a minute and squeeze my eyes shut, trying to stop the hot tears from leaking from them. She’s not out there, she’s dead or trapped somewhere without a radio, I knew it was a long shot, I shouldn’t have even bothered. If I hadn’t bothered I could at least pretend that –

The radio clutched loosely in my hands crackles to life. I glare at it, half-expecting to hear Fumi chew me out for using the radio in the first place.

“Roan?” Elena says. “Oh, my god, Roan, baby, is that you? Oh god, is that you?”


End file.
